Lepers
by Pernshinigami
Summary: The world beyond New Orleans burns under the infection, but nobody just lays down and dies, and everyone is a mutation of one. Though the ones bitten by Millhaven are twice shy, the southern sun kisses the refugees of Savannah, bringing new opportunity and life in the Crescent City while the quest to conquer microscropic dragons blesses and blights the survivors.
1. Tanked tested and swung

The boat was small, one room, but it had both a motor and a sail. Inside Rochelle had finally put down the ham radio and gone to bed. Ellis was snoring away on the other bunk. It was Coach's turn to steer but Nick still couldn't sleep. He couldn't pin down the flurry of discontent and frustration. It wasn't just a broken heart and a case of wandelust gnawing at him, for once Nick actually felt guilty about something and he actually felt like he'd lost something. "You mad at me Coach?"

"No... should I be?"

"You three... you had a chance at a life... you could have stayed and gone back to civilization and you let yourselves get exiled for me. Hell you could even have done something noble."

"Not exile man... and not your call all of us are grownups. Besides, the lady in charge... Doc Mercer, she said you could come back in a year or so... said she WANTS you there man. You made friends too, and made bank trading honestly with folks. You got a future there just not for the next year or so. Plus they're gonna call you back there in less than ten months you sly dog."

"Fuck my life." Nick grumbled. "All this because some asshole marine was overprotective of his sister." A slightly smug smirk crossed his face. Well, it wasn't the whole reason. The whole Felon no guns thing had come back to bite him. But god the look on that smug asshole's face when Mari hauled him into a tongue kiss in front of half the fort!

"Yeah daddy-o..." Coach teased, "You gon' be a daddy." He gave Nick a poke and a boyish grin. "Don't be sore you got somethin in all this mess to look forwards too. But besides that, the whole felon weapons dispute thing... Doc Mercer and Seargant Carter won the right to a vote on the matter. There's technically no United states anymore. Just relax and take life easy for once... daddy."

"Stop teasing me jeezus." Nick's face broke out in a sheepish grin. He looked up at the sky thinking about the day one adventure turned into another. With most electric lighting gone the stars were intense, beautiful enough to forget your cares for a bit.

~Two months before~

The door to the cell opened, and a man stepped in, flipping on the light. "You all can go." He told the guards. "GO!" He insisted when they turned reluctant. "right, you four are going with me... why they had to send me out when the doc's doing field work I'll never know." He was wearing a gas mask and heavy armor to resist bites. "Ya know, instead of meeting her outside that little village of hers but noooooo, I have to chase Mercer down while she's trying to bag experiment subjects."

The lights switched on in a simple glass apartment with an airlock at one end and special UV lighting. There was a hallway at the back leading to a bathroom with two toilet stalls a bathtub and a shower. There were four hospital beds, a shelf of books and an old CD player for entertainment. Coach, Ellis, Rochelle and Nick had each found a spot in the secure ward to set their bedrolls, each in a different corner for peace and quiet, and slowly, first Ellis and then the other three, rose. "So why are we being held in..." Rochelle started.

"You're being released. My brother's boss has a job proposal for you. I'm Major Allen Carter. Technically the US government doesn't exist anymore. Confirmed the death of the top ranking military personelle last month." He grumbled. "C'mon... up and at 'em, I don't like the glares I'm getting from my unit and I'm already gonna have to take a blood test for the green flu when I come back."

"Are things that bad?" Ellis blinked in surprise.

"The green flu jumped the missisippi last week, the infected are loose in the great plains and we're losing the support staff needed to run and maintain choppers and bombers. There's no more aircraft fuel being made, diesel has to be made by hand from kitchen waste or scavenged if we wanna run cars and APCs. There's no more mechanic staff to keep planes flying. Those fighter jets you saw in new orleans last week may be the last planes you ever see flying. Just as the bridge went down a hunter and a jockey leapt the gap and disappeared into the streets. We've got other reports of currents washing the infected downstream and across to the other shore with their bodies washing up and the scavengers carrying the virus away by tearing off chunks of the corpses. And multiple reports confirming that boomers can float. So you tell me. Leave the bedrolls, I'll issue new guns when we're out of here the ones you came with were burned."

Ellis bowed his head. "Sorry... I..."

"Don't be. I just need to square some stuff with Doc Mercer and she's in the field. You're gonna need those guns before we get to Fort Colony." Major Carter went from frustrated and dolorous to cold and focused.

"What's that?"

"An attempt to restart civilization. Right now we're going through an extinction level event. The WHO fell trying to trace the origin of the green flu and they failed. Every mammel species that encounters it is being destroyed by it with similar carrier populations to humans. The doc calls it a genetic bottleneck, said it happened to humans once before like thats supposed to make me feel better." The man snorted. "what upsets me the most is that even as those bombers were busting up perfectly good infrastructure we're never going to be able to repair in our lifetimes it was already too late. Dead infected washed down the mississippi and floating up in the great lakes. All those resources, all that effort, and the pilots most of whom died not long after, all for nothing!" the man kicked the ground in irritation.

"Can you actually do that? I mean its a virus isn't it? Wouldn't that be like trying to trace a ghost?" As they walked down the hallways of the military outpost towards the door Nick couldn't and could believe the things he was hearing. "Do you really think you can... I dunno, intercept it? The infected are pretty fast."

"They did it with smallpox in the sixties and seventies, saved a lot of need for vaccine production by zeroing down where the disease was thickest. Now its standard procedure when there's an outbreak, any outbreak, to find patient zero and work your way out from there. Epidemics aren't just medicine, they're detective work and math too. Randy was always better at it than I was. I looked at that equation and asked 'so does that mean we have more, or less zombies to shoot.'" Carter replied as he opened the door. The light was blinding and it took a moment for Nick's eyes to adjust. The major lead them to a pickup truck with a rumble seat in the back and a huge snowplow strapped to the front. "Buckle up, grab a rifle, I need one of you to keep your eyes out for spitters they'll wreck this baby's tires with their acid and then our little joyride is fucked."

Wordlessly Nick picked up a rifle and climbed in. Coach took charge. "Right, everyone cover a side of the truck. You heard the man, not like there are any tire factories still running so we pop one on an acid puddle we're screwed."

Still the wind in their faces after a week locked in a glass quarantine cage with a bathroom being the only private space and soldiers glaring at them 24/7 was exhilarating. Only a couple of spitters tried to jump them, and the plow took care of the normal infected and one unfortunate Jockey that tried to jump Rochelle's face through the windshield. A hunter actually tried to chase the truck but the Major gunned it and Ellis blew a raspberry at him as they pulled away from the snarling hooded zombie. "haha! eat our dust you bastard! wooooooo!"

They pulled into a construction site and Rochelle hopped out, taking in her surroundings a bit more carefully. There were easily a hundred people there, an arms table and a first aid station stocked with ample emergency heal kits and medicines. And in the center was a great big pit. A familiar roar rising from the pit caught Rochelle's attention, the woman jumped when she heard it. How could she not? By now hitting the deck or drawing and firing when a tank's furious bellow echoed off the empty buildings was a reflex. The people surrounding the pit were tense. Most were military personelle but there were some civilians all armed to the teeth. The tank's feet were tangled up in a heavy steel net that it was struggling to escape from. These weren't worn bricks and weak morter holding it and there was no warped wrought iron fire escapes for it to smash through. No the net holding the Tank's feet had been purpose built, probably just for snaring special infected. "BOOOORRAAAAAAAAAR!" An especially loud roar issued forth, and many on guard around the pit flinched.

A woman in a lab coat stood at one of the tables, readying a tranquilizer gun. She had long black hair in a tight braid and flashing dark eyes. "Not going to repeat the same mistake this time." Her lab coat was seriously old and stained, and a sun bleached slightly blood stained CEDA ID badge was pinned to her chest. The woman wore black rim glasses and a grim, tense smile. She touched her ID badge for a moment, a self reassuring gesture, and then squared her shoulders.

"What going ape on the tranks and ODying the tank? Dude its called fear, deal with it." Another man in a set of military body armor with a closely cut shock of light brown hair and a gotee mustache replied. "Especially given that the damn thing flipped a jeep over your head. What are you gonna do stand there and let yourself get hit? Na..." He had a jovial expression, but his face was careworn and sunbaked. As he cracked his neck and knuckles Rochelle could see a strange pattern of scars on his right hand. Some of them looked like teeth marks, but the others were... acid burns? A spitter? The mental image of this jolly soldier punching a spitter in the mouth popped into Rochelle's head, and for just a moment she was reminded of Francis.

"You actually managed to trap one?" Coach looked nervously over at the pit. "The other mutated zombies too?"

"Its not trapped yet. Its trapped when its down, restrained and in a cage. I'm hoping we can hobble it somehow without permanent damage." The woman said briskly.

"Trust me this is not the craziest thing we've done. I'm Seargent Randolph Carter, call me Randy or Carter for short." The soldier offered a hand to shake. "We use our immunity as a weapon Nora and I." The look of pride on his face was plain as he strode over to meet them.

Coach took it. "Call me Coach, thats Rochelle, Nick and Ellis."

"So bro, what I tell you? they came all the way down from georgia. Hell the file says Ro here's from Ohio." Major Carter chuckled. "They survived that long they have to have some chops. Plus you should have seen the shooting they did. Helluva marksman all of 'em and Coach and Rochelle didn't even think about picking up a gun till the shit hit the fan!"

"We'll take care of them. You should get back. If that mask comes off you're stuck out in the cold." Seargent Carter laughed. "Can't have my own brother catching the flu can I? I'd thump your back but I'd get you in trouble for it."

"Yessir. But the sentiment is appreciated. I'm not the one you have to worry about though." the Major grinned at the four of them. "You guys are in good hands here. Doc'll explain everything."

"I'll get the net gun ready Nora." Seargent Carter happily thumped the woman in the lab coat on the back. "Just get these guys squared away and if Shwartzenangry down there breaks free we'll deal with it." He took the trank gun from her and strode confidently away. "After all, its not killing the tank that makes this task hard... its bringing it home alive!"

"Alright." She smiled and motioned for the foursome to follow her to a truck slightly back from the crew guarding the tank. "Since he actually willingly pried a kid and a witch apart I trust him to be able to handle himself. Long story." She added. "Lets just say we get a lot of emotionally scarred people coming in. We have to keep a shrink on staff just for that because of all the emotional damage the apocalypse caused."

"I imagine so..." Rochelle hesitated before climbing up into the truck. When Nora sat down so did she, and the other three followed. "So... what's this about?"

Nora pulled out a small drawstring bag from her purse. "Green flu testing. This one's my creation, faster than the blood tests which take a few days. Then we have a talk." Nora handed each of them a vial. "Just spit into it. Don't worry you're not in trouble. I just need to know where things stand before I explain." She smiled at them, a very tired and sad look shone in her eyes though, contrary to the smile.

Rochelle looked left and right at her team mates. Nick was eyeing the vial like it was going to bite him. Coach was studying Doctor Mercer warily, like he was trying to figure her out and Ellis was looking at Rochelle for direction. She took a deep breath and spat into the test tube. Ellis and Coach followed suit and then glared at Nick. "Eeeh what the hell, I figured we would have been lined up against a wall and shot a week ago." The con man spat into the tube and handed it off like it was going to explode in his fingers.

Doctor Mercer dropped a small white ball into each, stoppered them shut and shook each test tube until the white ball started to dissolve in the saliva. It foamed slightly as it did so, the foam turning an ominous crimson in each vial one by one. Doctor Mercer looked pityingly at them, then noticing their confusion took out one of the tubes, and performed the test on herself. She held it up for them to see. The dissolving ball of white in her tube turned the same deep bloody crimson.

The woman sighed. "We are up the same shit creek you and I. So... I want you guys to think back to any contact you had with other people." Rochelle was too busy staring at the vial in horror, face turning white in shock not really comprehending the doctor's words as she realized what that red fizzing reaction meant. She didn't even register Nick lunging for the entrance, or Coach's sputter of protest. "SIT DOWN DAMNIT you aren't in trouble will you listen a minute?! THINK! Any encounters with people where a survivor suddenly turned? And how long ago if you can remember." She offered them back their test vials but Nick was too out of it to take his. Crap Nick was a neat freak with this news he could lose it. As a reporter Rochelle believed in truthfulness but this was bad. This was very bad. Why the hell couldn't she have lied?

Ellis' jaw hung open, and shut and open again. "The chopper pilot, the one that picked us up in whispering oaks." His voice was hoarse. "He turned into a zombie an Nick shot him." The normally cheery young man was shaking violently, eyes enormous with fear as he stared at the vial in his hand.

"What was that about three weeks after the world went to hell?" Coach was trying to remember.

Rochelle flipped open her old reporter's notebook. "More like a month going on 5. You're saying we've been infected this whole time?" The woman was struggling to regain her composure. Rochelle's heart was hammering in her chest and her hand wouldn't stop shaking as she looked at the vial in her hand. It felt like she'd just gotten a death sentence. "You're saying we were carrying the virus that whole time and didn't feel a thing?"

"Never heard of typhoid mary have you?" asked Doctor Mercer with a ruefull chuckle. "Born Mary Mallon, typhoid bacteria couldn't make her sick, but neither would her body fight them off. Her peach ice cream was to die for, literally. Unlike everything else she served, the ice cream wasn't heated and the typhoid bacteria could survive. But this... this is more tenacious than that, the green flu hangs on worse than even the old anthrax tests on Grunard Island back in the late fourties and fifties. and the damn thing doesn't want to culture in anything but brain tissue. We pinned down some genes from rabies so we know its related to that. My money's on an experimental weapon that escaped but I can't prove it definitively and too many people took their knowledge to the grave with them."

"I knew it! I knew we couldn't trust the military. But nooooooo lets call to be rescued." Nick looked like he was about to bolt, his skin slightly green. "Oh my god its on me, its in me ooooogg I'm gonna be sick." He stumbled to the back door of the truck to throw up.

"WILL YOU COOL IT?" Rochelle snapped. "Nick I'm trying to wrap my head around this a second. This isn't something a little hand sanitizer or some shit like that can fix!"

"YOU THINK I DON'T FUCKING KNOW THAT!?" Nick snarled, he looked like he was gonna pass out.

Mercer was watching them carefully, there was no hint of judgement in her voice or her body language. "Calm down all of you. Everyone in that circle out there is in the same situation as us. They're immune and carrying the virus. We're all each other has. But if we stand together we can weather the infected."

"And nowhere was spared?" Rochelle worried about her parents back in Ohio.

"Fraid not, its moving fast, should have hit the west coast by now. If there's someone you're looking for talk to our radio operator, but if its civilization you're worried about... infection is exponential." Rochelle was about to answer but was interrupted, there was a fresh roar from outside. The tank made one last desperate attempt to get free and then... BOOM! Rochelle ran out of the truck just in time to see the tank fall to the ground, toppeling three people into the pit trap with it, wrapped around and around in steel netting. Without skipping a beat the people who fell in cheerfully attached a rope to the top of the net, secured the corners of the net to a board at the bottom of their trap, and a sullen looking teenager climbed a nearby crane with the end of the rope and fastened it to the lifting mechanism.

"Right!" Seargent Carter bellowed. "Take your positions, I want everyone to take a health kit, your preferred weapon and an adrenaline shot. We aren't activating it until everyone's ready so speak up if you didn't get one!"

A handful of people collected extra first aid equipment and some grenades. "Pipe bombers are you ready?"

Several people on balconies waved their pipe bombs in answer.

"Circle ready?!" A roar of eagerness from the crowd. "Molys are you ready?!" More eager shouts, like a racehorse hellbent on getting onto the track. Ellis scrambled to get some more ammo, carrying the extra first aid pack in his teeth before shoving a molotov into the back of his pants. Coach swapped his shotgun for an AK. Nick grabbed a magnum and a bile jar. Rochelle scrambled to pick out a weapon. "Don't get the axe unless you have the upper arm strength to be quick." One of the soldiers warned her.

"Oh I'm quick." She lifted the axe with just her thumb and forefinger. "What about you jarhead?" She smirked, grabbing an AK 47 for herself.

"Better watch out dude." Ellis smirked. "I've seen Rochelle crack a charger between the eyes with one of those axes."

The man grumbled, taking his post. "Civies..."

"When you're ready raise your gun!" Rochelle ran to a spot next to the truck doctor mercer had pulled them into to test them for the virus and raised her gun up. One by one the others raised theirs. "Alright, start crane in ten seconds..." a burly looking man with no shirt and a really big bruise on his back jumped to the crane's driver's seat. "Ten... nine... eight..." Rochelle hurriedly checked her weapon over, took a grip on her molotov and then... "five... four... three... two... ONE!"

The crane started, the infected hoardes howled in the distance and then... the hoard shrieked and rushed the line while the crane lifted the unconscious tank in the air. Then the humans opened fire. A couple melee fighters including the moody boy with the samurai sword from earlier dove on the hoarde, hurling molotovs to try and cut off their entrance to the site. The boy cut three infected down in a single swipe, yelling in rage and hurtling himself into the fray with the fury of a demon.

The next ten minutes were a whirlwind. But Rochelle could see glimpses of how well practiced the group was. When a charger burst through the line they parted on reflex, left and right and let the charger fall into the pit before chucking bile jars at it. Sharpshooters on the roof picked off any smokers or spitters that came close. A couple of hunters tried to jump them but they covered each other way too well. Rochelle could almost imagine a net of gunfire coverage extending from sniper to sniper to sniper encircling their position. /When we work together, we're unbeatable./ The thought floated into her mind unbid as time seemed to slow in a battle hazed blur.

She caught a flash of Ellis cheering and hollaring in joy as he joined the melee. Coach was wading through the commons with a chainsaw, leaving destruction in his wake. "RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" a hunter leapt for the position Nick had taken on the fire escape only for the teenager and twenty something woman with him to slam it with a baseball bat. The unconscious tank was being swung carefully over to an open pickup truck. Just a few feet more and they could lower it down.

The nasal honking bellow of a charger on the attack brought Rochelle's attention back forwards. She dove out of the way of the speeding grey skinned cannon ball bearing down on her, skinning her elbows and stomach and covering her head. The back of her arms collided with Ellis' leg, causing him to stumble. "WOAH Rochelle easy!" The charger hit the pit and collided with the far wall, hitting its head.

"oooow." Rochelle groaned as Ellis pulled her to her feet. She looked over the edge of the pit just in time to see the charger, clawing at the walls, be put down by a pair of trank darts to the back of the neck and a bullet to its foot.

Doctor Mercer smirked, reloading her trank gun. "Bonus." The tank finally rested on the pickup truck. "Remember guys!" She told the crew. "If it wakes up prematurely gun the engine and get the fuck out of there." She clapped some kind of anklet onto its foot. "Radio collar is active. Jeezus these guys are thick." She thumped the bottom of the tank's foot and gestured for the guards to put the captured charger on as well. "Not bad, thirty minutes, four newcomers, two specimens and space for more of Ricky's masterfully made molotovs in our storeroom. I call that a win." She offered the four newcomers a hand up onto a second pickup truck. "C'mon. Lets get those scrapes cleaned up. You'll be sore but I don't think it warrents the use of a heal kit. Just keep it clean."

Nick hobbled up onto the truck, the others helping him on. "God damned smoker got through and wrenched me around. That fucking hurts!"

With everyone settled Seargent Carter started up the truck and pulled in behind the pickup carrying the tank."I'll have Mari give you a massage, and an ice pack. The latter after but I think you kinda need it. Does that hurt?" Doctor Mercer gently pushed on the back of Nick's shoulder.

"OW yes yes... and my right hip is about as bad. Shit..." He sat there sulking. Doctor Mercer opened a first aid box among the supplies in the truck and pulled out a disposible ice pack. Nick cracked the packs inside it with his fist and jammed it up against his hip joint. When his suit was too thick for the cold to be felt he shoved it inside the waistband of his pants to hold it still.

Nick stared down at his hands on the ride over. Rochelle gently put her hand on his shoulder. "Totally freaked?"

"I can't get the thought out of my head. Fuck." Nick growled. "Its in me and on me and jeezus I can't make it fucking stop!" His skin was crawling as thoughts of the dead cows he'd seen with the tops of their heads opened sprung to his mind and in his imagination he could see the virus clawing at his skull. Now that the thought was in his head and adrenaline had worn off Nick couldn't stop the broken record in his mind. /Its in me... its on me... I didn't feel a fucking thing... I'm such an idiot... I thought i could escape but it was in me all along... shit... no stop this Nick you're losing it! STOP./

"Smelling salts." Doctor Mercer handed Nick a worn but clean bandana.

Nick jumped, then he took it and sniffed it. "Lavender?"

"Concentrate on the smell and breathe as deeply as you can manage. Close your eyes... and breathe. Your friends are protecting the truck you can relax." Nick's brain was in a summersault. He shoved his nose in the bandana and started breathing in. That hamster wheel of "oh my god its inside me its on me and I didn't know it was there" kept turning in his mind, he breathed in as deep as he could, fighting the pain from the twisted up shoulder and wrenched leg to get a deeper breath. He'd learned body language control as part of his conman persuits and it was very handy when fighting the panic that was now ripping through his mind. "In for three seconds... hold for three seconds... oouuuuttt for three seconds. Focus on my voice and breathe. You are not sick, you are not being harmed by the virus, its living with you and you will perservere. Be calm... calm like the water... in... hold... ouuuuttt..."

Nick followed her directions, grateful that someone was able to steer him through the anxiety attack. "I haven't had one of those in... fucking months... Every time I get seriously dirty, crawling through sewers, swamps, mud, I'm always comforted by the thought that I can clean myself off, that I won't be IN the muck forever but this..." He was breathing hard, struggling not to hyperventilate.

"How long have you been like this around dirt?" Doctor Mercer asked him, eyeing Nick's body language carefully. She had the advantage of a medical view of human behavior. She could see the conman struggling to control his panic.

"Long fucking time. Years." Nick gasped out, trying not to hyperventilate and keeping his nose and mouth in the bandana. /Focus on the scent... focus on how it makes you feel... you got this Nick... but the... no no no! don't think about the virus... shit... she's trying to help you... FOCUS!/

"Shit... and any medications that could have helped are loooongg gone." Mercer pinched the bridge of her nose. "Nick I can coach you through some of this... it might be better to have a psych eval done and see Mari on a regular basis to keep the stress down. I can see the tension in your shoulders."

"I'm not LOSING it." Nick snapped. "The whole world just got wiped out by a disease I'm not paranoid."

"No, you're having a textbook panic attack." Mercer told him calmly. "Think of being immune as a shield. No... that won't really help the thoughts will it?"

"I can't! And no, it feels like there's a hamster wheel turning in my head. NOTHING stops those thoughts except time."

"Try..."

"I can't! Get this shit out of my system! I don't want it there!" Nick really was losing it. "I'm not crazy! I'm not paranoid!"

Ellis looked at Coach for a lead. Coach just kept his eyes on the area around the truck, keeping a careful eye and gun out for special infected. Ellis looked worriedly at Nick, and then questioningly at Rochelle. Rochelle shook her head at Ellis and then took Nick's hand and squeezed it. There wasn't much they could do but let Nick know his pain was heard. She didn't want Ellis saying something stupid that would set him off.

"You aren't Nick..."

"Then why send me to a fucking shrink?! Why mention medicine?" Nick's hand subconsciously tightened on Rochelle's.

"Nick its a chemical imbalence in your brain, but besides that everyone in the village sees the shrink every so often because your mind is just like all your other bodily systems, it needs medical care. And we have almost none. I'm a geneticist, a researcher, I haven't practiced emergency medicine in years and suddenly I'm faced with battlefield casualties? How do you think THAT weighs on me? But despite having no history of psychiatric illness I still see the shrink because I know doing so will help me be a better leader and a more objective scientist. As far as we know, there's 30 of us to continue the work CEDA did before this with thousands of researchers doctors and technicians, the people alive here need me at my best. Your friends need YOU at your best." Mercer looked Nick in the eyes over her glasses and said with quiet ferver. "If I can do it you can too. Its nothing wrong with your personality. Its just your brain messing with you. And believe me, as a doctor i've heard EVERY ignorant thing a person can say about different illnesses."

"Doc." Carter called from the driver's seat. "How about we start by getting the new folks settled in okay?"

Nick closed his eyes and focused on the lavender smell and his breath, trying to block out everything else. A couple of specials, including a very bouncy jockey with a seriously long scarf around his neck tried to catch the truck, only to be shot down and the Jockey to trip and get roadburn. Once Nick took his frustrations out on a smoker he saw on the rooftops, cracking it with a bile bomb from earlier with a snarl of frustration. Coach put a gentle hand on his good shoulder. "Easy there... you'll be alright." His paternal tone was somewhat comforting.

Then they reached a gate in a large junk wall. The junk wall had spikes sticking outwards, sharpened wood and steel poles bent in an outwards arch to make it hard for incoming infected to scale. The gate leading to it was an extra large chain link affair with outward leaning metal panels in the same shape as the arched fencepoles. The walls were guarded by men and women and even a couple teenagers. Many wore military uniforms, but not all. Most just carried hunting rifles but there were quite a few assault rifles and other military hardware among them.

"I'm going to have a psych eval done. That sounds too much like anxiety disorder to me." Mercer hopped off the truck, offering Nick a hand and using a take charge tone that she hoped he'd have trouble resisting. "But not right now. I'm going to secure the specimens, then we'll get you settled in."

Coach looked around curiously. It looked like they were outside of a fenced off urgent care facility with a couple of smaller apartment buildings and an old gas station and conveinance store. There were a couple of injured horses and other livestock in a paddock. Many bore the scars of starvation and secondary diseases but they didn't look like they were infected. There were a couple of scientists teaching a half circle of children what looked like a lesson on first aid and survival skills. There were gardens, some built straight up on the asphalt and many built from old junk. He caught sight of a target range and a truck of salvaged food and gas cans being unloaded, laundry being hung, hallow trauma worn faces wrought with stresslines. And the soldiers, the shadows he saw in their eyes... Coach knew that look. Everything he'd known had been destroyed, that look might have been his if he hadn't found his teammates.

"here." Carter tossed him a pack of gum. "Sorry I don't have a better welcome gift. Candy and smokes make for good reassurance that you aren't gonna attack a survivor you don't know."

Coach nodded. "These people... they look like they've been through hell."

"Yep... sure have! Better catch up before they leave you behind!" Carter raised his rifle jauntily over his shoulder and strode off to a firepit where a couple of soldiers from different branches of the military were chugging cups of coffee. They waved him over with wane smiles and one of them saluted cheerily.

Coach followed Mercer and his team into the door marked "Morgue." They went through a utility hallway into the drawer storage where bodies were kept, an alcove beyond served as the autopsy theater. An elderly man in a lab coat was bent over a smoker he had cut open on the table. His hair was recently cut and it looked like he'd just showered not long before. He had a bowtie and an oxford shirt on under his labcoat, even wearing nice pants. "you're just in time. I finished some interesting readings on his musculature. Poor fellow was probably not long for this world when he turned, would have been N stage lung cancer I even found his stoma." Then he looked up and saw that Mercer had brought someone new along. "Aaaah you found some more strays, though we've long since passed dunbar's number, the more join us the safer the human race is in the long run." He smiled up at Coach warmly.

"Nice to meet you, call me Coach. These are Ellis, Nick and Rochelle."

"Ethan Woad, corner, CEDA. I'd offer you a handshake but my hands are a bit of a mess." His latex gloves were covered in blood and sickly black tar. "Nora my dear, you should see what I found cutting this fellow apart." Woad moved back to the smoker corpse. "you all can come closer, he can't hurt you anymore and this might actually be interesting." The man's brittish accent and cheery, almost grandfatherly lilt put Coach at ease enough to want to have a look.

Nick shivered as he investigated the dead Smoker's open ribcage. "are its lungs... seething?"

"Fascinating." Mercer pulled on a pair of latex gloves and picked up a pair of foreceps.

The Smoker's lungs were solid black, and appeared to be heaving slightly. Coach made a face, shivering at how creepy they were. "You ain't seen nothing yet." Woad said gravely. He carefully sliced a heaving section off and put it into a surgical tray. It was a tentacle, and it was wriggling. "watch." He carefully waved his scalpel over the tentacle. A section of it shot up and tried to grab the scalpel.

"is that... wait a minute, that thing behaved like an amoeba right there." Mercer looked confused. Nick's green tinge returned to his face as he eyed the thing on the tray.

"I'd have to put it under a microscope, but I'm fairly sure its a lung tumor cell. A giant one. A smoker's tongue may very well be a tentacle of lung tumor cells instead. It may even be an extension of his lungs, able to respirate. Poor fellow. It looks quite painful. My guess is the black tar sputum is to allow the tongue to shoot smoothly without pain. Its misshapen and elegant all at once. There are specialized muscles on one side of his face and neck that probably form a firing mechanism but I'd have to get one alive to tell for sure."

"Huh, have you tried plying it with a chemotherepy drug?"

"Not yet." Woad smiled. "I'll have to wait for the salvage teams to hit a hospital."

Coach stepped back, shaking his head at the disturbing thought of a tumor with a mind of its own, and then noticed the tiny figure kneeling near one of the morgue drawers. A little boy about 5, thin and pale with his face in his hands. "Hey who's that?"

"Mason, he doesn't talk. Mercer I'm sorry to say he's gone into one of his fits again. Thats Sissy's drawer he's sitting next to. He heard the witches singing last night and he's been like this all day I'm afraid." Rochelle and Coach cautiously approached the boy, Mercer behind them.

They knelt down next to the boy, Mason. "Mason?" Mercer asked quietly.

"Sissy... sissy was singing again..." The boy's grey eyes peered blankly up at them through unkempt light brown bangs.

It clicked after a moment. "His sister became a witch?" Coach asked worriedly. Come to think of it, the boys posture was identical to the weeping position the witches typically sat in. The vacant look on his face would have meant he was passive enough the infected might not realize he wasn't one of them. The way he carried himself as he sat up was very witch like, slouched, not making eye contact.

"Yes, but because he was quiet and still she didn't turn violent towards him. Carter, good man that he was, saw a boy near a dangerous zombie and drew the witch away, then killed her. He didn't realize until it was too late who she was to the little boy or how fragile his mental state was. We all take turns watching him now. You know his body language mimickry of the witch is very accurate. It might be the reason why the infected didn't maul him to death. They thought he was one of them. Witches as a rule don't have much in the feminine figure department, and children before puberty are fairly androgenous."

"The problem is if he hears a witch he tries to find her thinking its his sister. The boy is semi catatonic and definately developmentally damaged from psychological trauma." Mercer added.

"boss tank's settled in." One of the soldiers came in the room. He hesitated when he saw Mason and walked over to the boy. Coach stepped back, watching as the soldier left a chocolate bar next to the boy. "Get well soon little guy."

"It takes a village." Coach remarked as the man left.

"Indeed." Woad replied darkly. "Well, I'd better get as many samples from this smoker as I can. Its not all that scientific because it wasn't in the control group for Nora's experiment and so the results could be skewed, but its useful none the less." He nodded to Mercer, who stood and lead them up the hallway futher. Beyond this was a room with two banks of heavily reinforced cages.

Ellis curiously looked in the cages, examining them and their contents. They were made of bullet proof glass and steel bars. Each one had a note taped to the glass indicating what experiment was being done on it. "What was the experiment?"

"I was using a technique that was used during the 1918 flu pandemic, though I couldn't use horses we've only found a few that are immune to the virus so far, couldn't risk it. You take blood from someone who survived the disease, centrifuge it to remove any parts that would have to be matched by blood type, and inject it into someone who's sick, hoping you've caught antibodies for it in your sample. Very primitive vaccine, capable of carrying a lot of diseases with it but if its what you've got you use it. And right now all we've got is our disease."

"NORA NORA!" A teenage boy leapt out of a door nearby and threw his arms around Mercer. "you're back! I saw them put the tank in a cage! you got a charger too? who's gonna get dibs?"

"Not sure yet. Anything interesting happen?"

"oh yeah! Nurse Frond thinks the current tank is gonna drop any time now! The one in the control group! The current betting is three days! And you should see the hunter from the experimental group you need to see!" Coach curiously followed the boy and Mercer towards one bank of cages with a number of commons, six empty cages and one lone hunter.

"This your blood serum test?" Coach asked. Mercer nodded.

"They're so quiet." Rochelle said in a hushed voice. "Suddenly I feel like I'm in a library." The commons were absolutely silent. Not so much as a peep. No restless banging or shifting, no mumbling and high pitched yowling. Just quiet and staring at them like caged animals, unsure whether or not they're there for the slaughter.

"Yes, hmmm it seems to have quieted their insanity somewhat. Wait what?" Mercer hesitated, then grinned giddily. "They're eating! Oh my god they're eating!" She happily jumped up and down. "YAHOO! One step down! oooooh wait till I show the others!"

"Wait why the hell is that a good sign?" Nick demanded. "They look like ordinary infected to me... oh my god that hunter is drinking broth out of a bowl like a cat." he snickered at the sight of a cute behavior coming out of a big nasty zombie. The hunter growled slightly and Coach caught a flash of bloody eye socket and blue irises under the hood. He'd never noticed... were they all blind? Or were his eyes just bleeding?

"I'd think getting beat up by them you'd have noticed by now, the infected don't eat. They pummel people to death but they don't eat, let alone eat them." Mercer explained, pointing to the common infected in the cages and the half empty bowls of what looked like mashed potato. Coach realized just how emaciated they were. He never thought about it. He saw a zombie, but Mercer saw a behavior, a mind."They attack each other, they vomit and although they don't sleep they do rest. But they never eat even when you put food in the cell with them. It just sits there till it spoils."

"But getting them to eat isn't that big of an achievement is it?" asked Ellis curiously.

"If they didn't eventually they'd die." Mercer replied. "Food, water, exposure, lack of sleep. If we first want to cure the infection we have to be able to keep the infected alive so there are ones to cure. This is a start at least. Shame for the specials. We got one of each in each trial group, even a witch and a tank but it looks like the only one that survived in the experimental group was this hunter." The hunter yawned, crawled over to a mat at the back of the cell and fell asleep. "Jeezus I didn't want them to be docile like this... this is strange." The other infected were slowly falling asleep as well.

"its the bone broth doc!" The boy chuckled. "It makes me fall asleep! and they cooked the instant mashed potatoes with some too!"

"its not a bad choice." Coach mused. "really nutrient dense, ma used to make me some when I got sick. Everything your body needs to make more immune cells, right in one steamin bowl of parental love." He licked his lips. "Actually, I'm jealous, I haven't had any in a long loooong time."

"The kitchens serve chicken broth when they can get chickens." The boy licked his lips. "The One 4 All brought us a pig last week, he's gonna be good eating but the grownups are waiting for a female! They got some of our cucumbers and tomatoes for it! The yellow cukes they got came from my garden too!" He beamed in pride through shaggy blonde bangs. "And Virgil came through the other day said he was gonna find us some chickens!"

"oh is this where he stopped after he dropped us off?" Rochelle chuckled. "I was curious where he was off to in such a hurry."

"There are a lot of small vessels plying the waters in the carribean, all of them people who escaped the green flu. The ones that are carriers come in regularly to trade and get any medical care they need." Mercer explained. "There are about 400 of us counting you guys. I want people here who are ballsy enough to try and catch the special infected rather than killing them. I need subjects and we don't have much time. The earliest infected are dying off either by bullets or exposure. The more humans survive this the better our odds are of being able to start over. If we don't have enough people to repopulate after this the genepool will be too squeezed and we won't have healthy generations of humans further down the line. Its not just short term safety its long term viability and genetic health."

"oh i see, so you need us to catch specimens!" Ellis grinned. "i'm totally in, plus I'm a mechanic so I can do that too."

"What's your rate?" Nick of course.

"Barter mostly sorry." Mercer chuckled. "and if you need a sample looked at, we've got a bunch of nurses in training who need the practice." She opened the door to a room with a bunch of microscopes, some computer monitors, a blood centrifuge, something that had a bunch of pietri dishes in it, and a large refrigerator sized machine over on its side.

Inside were three women, one of whom couldn't have been more than 16, and a young man who looked barely 20. A tall black nurse with a number of silvery hairs and her hair pulled back in a bun seemed to be teaching the class. They were looking at something on a computer monitor. "Seriously Martin you discovered this in a boomer's stomach? Braver man than I."

"Yep." The young man beamed. "Doc Mercer says its a brand new strain of ecoli, never seen before. I put carbolic acid on it that thing just shrugged it off like nothing!"

"Which is why I'm doing something rare and giving you a homework assignment Martin." Mercer chuckled. "Kill a spitter and search its stomach for signs of this or a similar strain."

"you think the boomer got it from a spitter?" The youngest of the women asked, tilting her head.

"Perhaps, since Carbolic acid is an archaic disinfectant known to kill plague bacteria. And yet plain old ecoli survived? No thats not an adaptation I'd attribute to a boomer I'd wager that strain came from a spitter and the two were similar enough for it to survive." Mercer motioned the others forward. "Nurse Lilly, we have some new folks that will be procuring samples..."

Coach smiled warmly. "Just call me Coach." he offered his hand to the black woman, Lilly, to shake. She took it, with a firm squeeze and a slow grin. "It would be an honor to help such a stately lady."

"Mmm, flattery smells as sweet as apple pie... I suppose you'll do." Lilly teased.

"And this is Mari, Nick I wanted to introduce you." Mari had dark hair and dark brown eyes. She had a deep southern tan and a hint of muscle underneath. Her body was perfectly proportioned. Neither end too broad or narrow a curve. Nick felt a blush rising in his cheeks. "She's our physical therapist. Keeps our folks on their feet but she was branching out into massage when the infected came."

"A pleasure. I hear you have magic hands." Nick suddenly felt self concscious, rolling his injured shoulder and wincing slightly when it refused to move smoothly without pain.

"Nick got wrenched by a smoker and..." Mercer put her body between the nursing class and the others, moving them to a corner a bit and keeping her voice low. "Another panic attack case." Nick looked at his shoes a moment.

"Thats the third one this month. Alright, we can start after supper tonight. You taught him the breathing exercise?"

"Yep." Mercer smiled. "you're in good hands then I think Nick."

"Hmmm..." Mari eyed his suit. "That needs a wash. I help folks destress and I can tell you clean laundry is one of the simplest."

"There's washing here?" Nick asked eagerly.

"Kinda... we have a bunch of hand crank stuff from a museum. We even made a spinning wheel out of an old penny farthing bike."

"What ones are the penny farthings?" Nick couldn't remember ever hearing that name.

"Those big ones from the early 1900s with the massive wheel in front?" Mari chuckled.

"Oh yeah i never knew what they were called. Those are just ridiculous!" Nick laughed. "So what you all pull out a wash board or something?"

"Better, because its chest height it can hold like four to six outfits depending on how heavy guage a cloth they are." Mari beamed. "We'll get you some sweats so you don't have to sit around in your underwear being gawked at. My experience is folks with anxiety don't really like being stared at. And with a build like that you are definately gonna get some staring."

"pfffft, when the zombies came I was just gunning to get laid. So there I am on a hotel rooftop in savannah with three people I don't know and I've got lipstick on my neck and a hickey." Nick chuckled. No way was he going to admit to being self conscious, not in front of miss dark and beautiful.

"Well you never know." Mari said serenely. "One of the problems with a zombie apocalypse is that you don't know how people are going to deal with it psychologically. You've been traveling with the same three people for weeks now but haven't had to live in a large group of people with the same possible threats. And when something went south for you guys you could just move on. Civilization building, or rebuilding which is what we're here for isn't like that. You can't run from a hoarde if you're a settlement, but if your numbers and interpersonal relationships are healthy you can fight back against it."

Nick spared a glance at his traveling companions, Coach was seriously into Lilly. As much as a fellow educator as an attractive potential love interest. Ellis and Martin were swapping stories about fighting the infected versus studying them and Martin was showing off his mutant boomer bacteria on the digital microscope. Rochelle was asking about the ham radio operator again and the teenage girl was trying to give her directions to the radio tower but wasn't quite getting it right and her companion kept interjecting with every error.

"Huh, I never thought of that." And now that he did, Nick realized just how intimidated he was by the prospect of having to get along with a settlement of some 400 odd fellow carriers, many of whom were CEDA or Military affiliated survivors. "So... what else do you do? I mean just PT or..."

"I'm learning nutrition and nursing related skills. And we do have a museum curator among the survivors living here. Thats how we got so many hand crank devices." She chuckled. "Thats how we got the blood serum technique too. This isn't the first unstoppable plague humanity has fought. As long as there are people who are naturally immune no disease is going to be a hundred percent effective at killing us. If there's one thing we learned from that history being available to us its that the biggest danger to us is the knock on effects of a doomsday plague. Losing electricity, running water, refrigeration, manufacturing, combustion engines, rapid travel, rapid communication, advanced medical devices and all those lovely things that let us specialize in one or two professions for our entire lives all of that is gone. Weakened by hunger and stress our population is at risk of secondary disease taking hold and wiping us out. Hell think about all those people with pacemakers or who needed dialysis or who had HIV. They're all dead. They needed medical technology to keep them alive and now they're gone because that tech is gone."

"Jeez I didn't think of it that way... I was too busy worrying about the zombies to think about the rest of the world. I just assumed everyone was dead, didn't matter how. um..." He looked over at the others. But Coach was too busy making nice to the greying nurse. "How about we go take care of that shoulder huh?"

"Sure thing neighbor." Mari grabbed a backpack from the doorway to the lab, slung it over her shoulder, and lead Nick out to her studio. "Lets start with limbering up that shoulder and getting you some spare clothes. And I want you to keep a notebook of when and what you're doing when your anxiety symptoms hit. Sometimes playing psychological detective with yourself reveals a lot more than you think, even if you don't share those insights with other people."

~present~

Nick smiled at the stars. Also god damn Smoker wounds hurt. Twist you in the breeze like a hangman's noose or swing you around like some demented carnival ride. But Mari was worth it, all of it, he'd get strung up for her any time. "You know Coach, I didn't think it was possible to feel like a horny awkward teenager again." Coach started laughing.

Then he heard it on the radio. "Romero calling Lacewing, Romero calling Lacewing, we're becalmed any vessels in the area that can give us a tow?"

"hmm lemme see..."

"Was that who I think it was?" Nick blinked in surprise.

"It sure sounded like..."

"I'mma go see what we can do." Coach slowed the boat, cut the engine, and went to the radio with a huge grin on his face. "Zoey, remember me its Coach? You got GPS coordinates? Lets see if we're close by."

"Thanks, we've been becalmed for a little over a day, good to see you again by the way. We don't have a motor on our rig. I forgot Fort Colony had this thing installed on the One 4 All when we were in port."

"Yeah looks like Virgil's headed in the opposite direction, headed for Texas." Fort Colony's operator, callsign Lacewing sighed. "Lucky for you those radios have GPS transponders installed. Coach the One 4 all should be over the horizon a ways to the south of you. Zoey you got your flare gun?"

"Yep just like you taught me three of anything right?"

"In this case he knows you're there somewhere so only one is needed but yes." Lacewing replied. "Zoey i need you to set one flare off, count ten seconds. Straight up as little arch as possible. Coach look to the south for the flare."

Nick sat up, and saw the streak of red. "hey they aren't too far."

"Alright guys safe travels. This is Lacewing signing off."

"This is Romero signing off, see you soon!"

Coach started up the engine, Nick pointed to where he'd sighted the flare and Coach turned just a bit in that direction. "When we meet up with them Nick, you make sure to lie down. I know Ellis is probably gonna be real loud but you gotta try and rest."

"Aw shucks dad things were just getting interesting." Nick yawned.

"Dad yourself Daddyo." Coach laughed as he turned the small boat around a bit. "And no, I'm not done teasing you till you look your kid in the face and I watch your cold snarky self melt like the wicked witch of the west!" He held up a hand in a sideways high five.

Nick's laughter echoed on the night as he returned the gesture. "Back at you and Lilly, c'mon you aren't telling me you didn't tap that, not with the looks you gave her!" The two men's hearts were light with hope, something in painfully short supply, as the stars winked above with clarion crystal beauty and the moon seemed enormous on the horizon.


	2. Mimickry

Ellis managed to sleep through the radio calls, and the flare gun fire. But he couldn't sleep through the voice that whispered in his ear. "Elllissss, your driving sucks."

Ellis sat bolt upright in bed, blinked in surprise as the figure in the pink track suit came into focus and hollared in delight. "ZOEEEEEEYYYYY!" With a giddiness that only a jockey could match he swung Zoey around in the cramped confines of the motor boat's cabin.

Only his cry of joy startled Rochelle out of bed. Rochelle yelped, her head knocking into Zoey's back and suddenly the three of them were on the floor of the boat in a heap. Rochelle scrambled up, yelling at Ellis about startling her. But he was too ecstatic to pay attention to her. "I missed you soooooooo!" Ellis hauled Zoey into a noogie, and then she wiggled out of his arm and did the same. "woah you noogie hard!"

"Chalk it up to Bill's teachings and tons and tons of running and swinging melee weapons around." Zoey beamed. "i start swinging a sword and even Francis ducks!"

"um... hang on... you forgot something... that was your friend in the building near the lift right? Old guy?"

Zoey blinked. "yeah why." Her face fell, like she was remembering something very far away.

Ellis dug around in his pockets and pulled out a worn slightly damp very rumpled roll of cloth. He straightened Bill's hat out, took the lighter out of the inside, and put the hat on Zoey's head before offering the Zippo. Zoey held out her hands, eyes tearing up as he gingerly set it into her cupped palms. "Th... thank you..." She hugged Ellis in a tight squeeze, deeply felt rather than the excitement of finding each other again. "He kept us alive... I wouldn't have ever met you if he hadn't saved us."

"I saw the record you left at Fort Colony. Three tanks?"

"Yeah..." Zoey wiped her eyes. "I keep seeing his face as he looked back at us... just once... then he jumped right in. Francis almost went after him. But... I couldn't lose him too. We're like family now, the lot of us. I lost a foster father, couldn't lose a foster brother too. The last thing he said to us was 'take care of each other.'"

Ellis patted Zoey on the shoulder. "So how'd Coach find you guys?"

"The radio." Zoey chuckled. "I'd forgotten Lovelace had it installed. Said whatever data we could gather on what was going on out there was payment enough."

"oh yeah the guy named after the computer guy. The radio operator."

"Girl, Ada Lovelace was a girl, Adam Lovelace is the radio operator. Anyway, we got something for our farm on this island called Monseratt. We were poking around trying to find anything else we could scavenge." Zoey chuckled. "Baby chicks, and a dog that looks like he's immune too. He's got a broken leg though."

"Why didn't you tell us? About the carriers... I got the shit scared outta me when Doc Mercer did her field test!" Ellis protested.

"Not the best way to start a conversation. 'hey complete stranger I'm Zoey and we might all be carrying the virus and not feeling it.' Thats a sure way to get a bullet to the brain."

"I guess..."

"So how long did you stay at Colony?" Zoey asked curiously.

"A couple of months. We made bank trading muscle for stuff. Learned some interesting things too and I got to fix up an APC. Never done that before!" Ellis beamed. "It was like driving Gibbs Jr.'s stock car. As a mechanic I learned a ton of stuff just driving it, only here it was helping to take the damn thing apart and put the parts in a broken one to make it work again. They're actually filing auto parts by year model and condition in that shop!"

As they walked out to have a look at the One 4 All and Ellis hopefully looked around for the dog they passed Rochelle and Francis binding the two boats together. Rochelle accidentally reached for the same rope that Francis did, and when their hands touched she blushed slightly. "Um... I don't really hate your vest..."

"... I know you were just trying to impress me with how much you hate stuff! With a shot like that though you don't have to, you got eagle eyes!"

Ellis smiled and followed Zoey to a plastic sterilite box inside the One 4 All. She opened the top and the two peered in to see a ton of little yellow balls of fluff with beaks peering up at them. "No momma?"

"We ate her for supper, hadn't had meat in so long. Fish and coconuts will only keep you going for so many nights before you need something heavier. So... that blood serum of Mercers... did it work? Did they find anything new about the infected?"

"Well..."

~Flashback~

The song and the crying woke Ellis up. "hng... witch..." he groaned rolling over. He hauled himself out of bed, more on instinct than anything else. "Stuffed yerself on Lentils and canned chicken and now you can't wake up... fuck meeeeee." He walked to the front "porch" of the half finished apartment they'd been settled into.

And when a second voice responded to the witch Ellis started rubbing his eyes. Down in the courtyard Mason was staring at the sky with his head all the way back, ululating along with the witch's haunting croon. " _oooOOOOoooOOOoooOOooOOooOOoooo_ " and then Mason. " **oooOOOoooOOOoooOOooooOOO**..." The five year old was note on with the imitation but this late it just irritated Ellis more.

Ellis groaned and started rubbing his cheeks now. He shuffled along the walkway constituting the "porch" for the rest of the quarters until he came to a divide. He shambled up onto the guards walkway from there and stopped to ask a cluster of the men on watch. "What's going on?"

"Third night the witches have been singing... snickerdoodle? Fresh from the oven." He offered Ellis a cookie.

Ellis blinked sleepily, then took it. "Three whole nights? Are you sure its the same witch? there's only one down there."

"Killed the last one when we couldn't take it anymore. I swear Mason could have brought on a hoard the way he screamed. Not doing that again."

"She's leaning on the wall, what the hell is she here for?" The man with the cookies leaned over the side. A chunk fell off one. "SHIT!"

Ellis grabbed a pistol from the foldable table the men had been gathered around and peered over the railing through the barbed wire and curved slats. The witch's nose twitched and she stopped. Sniff... sniff... sniff... the zombie creeled slightly like she was getting ready to startle. "Crap." Ellis scrambled to check the pistol's magazine and take the safety off. But the Witch leaned over the piece of cookie on the ground, sniffing and bringing her face really close down. "Is she... smelling that cookie piece?"

"Seriously?" One of the other men laughed. "hey George your grandmas snickerdoodles are so powerful they're witch bait!"

"Shut up..." The older of the quartet hissed. The five men stared over the side at the witch as she sniffed the cookie, turning in different directions as if she were trying to home in on the smell but couldn't. She didn't seem to know what to do with the piece of cookie on the ground. She stared at it, poked it with a long nail, but made no move to snap it up.

"Doc Mercer wasn't kidding..." Ellis blinked in surprise. "She ain't eatin, with her ribs showing like that you'd think..."

"Think we can catch her? Shame to waste the experiment subject and maybe Ethan will know what to do." George, the man with the cookies, suggested.

"After last night I used some of my candy rations to trade for some trank darts... signed out the gun." The oldest nodded. "At the very least we can get Mason some peace and quiet tonight."

"you folks really care about that boy doncha?" Ellis asked, a warm smile crossing his face for a moment. "Looks like he's in good hands with you folks."

"Everyone is curious about him to some extent or another. But if he dies before he learns how to talk again we won't know what happened to him." George explained. "And after all that craziness, I mean his behavior's spot on for a witch but every test we got says he's human."

"maybe it was the sugar..." Something was rolling around in Ellis' brain, it just took awhile because he'd been woken up in the middle of the night. "The sugar mill! Thats it! Thats why the witches were there."

"Hmmm? Whatchu on about?" The oldest guard of the four turned to look at him from where he was counting and loading the trank darts.

"We stopped at this sugar mill on the way here... the place was swarming with witches. One of them had sugarcane pulp under her finger nails. A whole bunch of it came off in my wounds when she sliced me. I thought she'd just gotten caught in the canes or something and sliced them away in frustration. What if she were touchin the rollers? What if they wanted the sugar!"

"Woad will know." George assured him. "Ready Phil?" He asked the oldest of the group.

"Yep... I got 3 magazines each to get us over to this part of the wall. Lucky for us the Gate's not more than 50 feet from our station." The soft clank of a trank dart echoed in the night air. The witch screamed and started trying to climb the wall. But it was for naught, the curved outer poles of the fence kept knocking her off. Her quickened pulse caused the tranquilizer to take effect faster. In a minute or so the witch fell over asleep from the drug.

Ellis shoed Mason back to bed, heading for Woad's little office off the morgue entrance where George told him the boy's cot would be. He gave one of the cookies to Mason and the boy gladly ate it without complaint. Mason followed Ellis into the morgue entrance and the mechanic counted the doors till he came to one that was ajar with the name "Woad" on it. "hey doc... hey doc..." Ellis knelt next to a small cot and the blanket covered figure on it and shook Doctor Woad.

"Nrg." The elderly Coroner groaned, eyes fluttering open. "What is it my boy?" He sat up. "oh... Mason thank you for getting him."

"Phil tranked a witch. They're restrainin her and bringin her in." Ellis kept his voice low.

"oooooh after the shrieking last night I'm not surprised he did that Phil doesn't like loud noise if it doesn't suit tactical necessity to do so. Well best not to waste a trank." he gave Ellis a notepad and a roll of tape and told Mason. "Go back to bed my boy... you're safe... no screaming tonight."

"Sissy didn't scream tonight..." Mason yawned, going to another cot on the other side of Woad's office and laying down. The boy swallowed the last of his cookie and wrapped himself up in blankets.

"Poor kid." Ellis muttered, taking the items and the pen Woad dug out of his pocket. "What're these for?"

"Go to the cages, there's 7 open near H Doe, the hunter from the trial group. Put a note on one saying what happened. Should be unlocked."

Ellis hurried up the hall to the room where the infected specimens were kept. He opened one of the empty cages and started writing the note. "captured... during... night... watch..."

"Graoooow..." H Doe sat up on the heavy mats he'd fallen asleep on in his cage, getting to his knees and raising his head to sniff the air.

"Easy big fella." Ellis made some kind of pacifying gesture at the Hunter without thinking about it.

"mrrmmmble..." the Hunter yawned, then shuffled to the front of his cage and looked up at Ellis, one good eye blinking up at him under the hood. There were claw marks around his eyes, the scabs starting to peal off to leave scars. His eye, the hunter's remaining eye was a bright blue. Did they all have eyes like that? He couldn't remember. Maybe the use of the blood serum was making Ellis paranoid about H Doe, looking for things and behaviors that weren't there.

"Hey you're blind in that eye? What happened?" Ellis started pulling off four pieces of tape to hang the note with, attaching each to his wrist to keep them out of the way. Sure enough, it looked like H Doe had clawed at his face. "Seriously? did you claw your own eye out? Whatcha do that for?"

"Hnnrrgggrrr." The Hunter put his face right up to the cage door. "Hraaaaaaaarrrrr..." It was a quieter version of his pouncing roar, with a quizical edge to it.

"Well you sound a bit closer to human now. Making different noises from before aincha... why aincha attackin me?" Ellis hurriedly hung the note.

Scriiiiittcchhh scriiiiiiiiitcchhh. H Doe slowly, tentatively started scratching the front of the cage door, as if he didn't understand what it was there for.

"Huh, creepy... maybe Doc's right." Ellis mused. "you don act like a normal hunter. Her blood serum do that to ya?" He put a reassuring hand on the glass and wire door of the cage.

H Doe tried to swipe at it with a snarl.

On instinct Ellis snatched his hand back. At that moment Phil came wheeling the witch in on a gurney with Woad. The others had gone back to the wall. Woad quickly started drawing blood from the witch's arm. "Hmm? What's this?" He held one of the vials up to the light. "Sludgy blood?"

"So the virus probably did it, hurry up doc we gotta get her locked down." Phil said with a grumpy scowl.

"You're right about getting her locked down, but none of the specials I dissected this past week had sludgy blood." Woad got four vials. "I reccomend thoroughly washing your hands my good man, and keeping an eye out for if you get sick. You never know. Its been a couple weeks since I've seen one like this... maybe two and a half. And nobody got sick from handling the one I'm thinking of."

"Why what are you thinking?" Phil asked, scowl deepening. Ellis' head tilted slightly as well.

"That I do not wish a repeat of the Broad Street pump! And neither should any former or current resident of the united kingdom." Woad said fervently. "I will do some testing, and tell you what I found in the morning!"

Within a few minutes the witch was hooked up to an IV and locked up in the cage next to H Doe's. Phil went back to his watch very grumpy. "how come ya added sugar to it?" Ellis wondered curiously.

"Her body needs to make blood plasma, it can't do that if her blood sugar is chronically low. At this point I don't think she could eat even if we gave her that serum. A common sense response my boy, if you are dealing with someone who's ill and severely dehydrated, is to give them water salt and sugar as best you can, it will keep their blood from becoming like our dear witch here. Poor lass. Maddened, sickened and starved."

"you don't hate them at all do ya?" Ellis asked curiously. "I don't know if I should or not... they did a lotta damage but they didn't understand what was goin on."

"My boy they are victims, albeit victims trying to kill us but they are victims none the less, and every line in this poor girl's face has a story to tell. Or rather on her arms."

"Why whaddid you see?" Ellis bent close to the cage. In the dim light he caught it... scars across her arms and punctures on her legs here and there. "These needle scars?"

"And cutting scars. The poor lass was in emotional agony before turning and she still is. No surcease. Probably painkillers, to dull her from feeling anything. The cuts release pleasant chemicals into the brain. Its why some people who cut just can't stop."

"What would happen if you gave her that serum of Mercer's?"

"Right now? probably kill her, get a couple of these ivs into her though... hell she's so dehydrated I don't think she could even relieve herself poor girl. We had a witch do this before. Then as now we took a blood sample and found it sludgy. The sample was negative for cholera. She probably doesn't have it, but my minor in premed was history. I know what diseases to watch for, all of them the worst killers of mankind and all of them could take advantage of a vulnerable population like ours. When it was rife, Cholera could fell young men in the prime of their lives, like yourself, in a little over a day. And when sanitation made it impossible for the disease to spread, if forced itself to become milder so that people with it would travel someplace where it could spread again... sound familiar?"

"The green flu." Ellis answered, nodding sagely. "We don't feel a damn thing. You tellin me this is some kind of adaptation to spread where people don't have it?"

"Yes, and its neither the first nor will it be the last. Syphallis is also two faced in this manner. The version Colombus brought home with him turned virulent and vile because the people there didn't have shared dishes the way the native americans did. When it could spread with shared cups and bowls Syphalis was mild, but the Spaniards all had their own dishes, so it became an STD. But there are many odd things about the green flu that I don't think natural shifting could account for. And Doctor Mercer agrees with me. About fifty percent of the people who have the green flu, their virus has a protien present we've previously only seen in flu viruses, hemaglutanin. Its what lets the regular flu virus get into lung cells. Smokers, Boomers and Spitters seem to have the highest concentrations of these hemaglutanin positive green flu viruses, with carriers like yourself the proportions are closer to 50/50."

"But I thought it was a mutant rabies..." Ellis' eyes widened a moment. "... Rochelle even pointed out the cows where their heads were cut open was a test for it."

"What does that tell you then? Viruses swap genes by infecting the same cell simultaneously. Flu is well known for crossing species in this manner. But Rabies infects nerve cells, flu infects lung cells. The two should never meet. And in all of historical memory, rabies itself has never shifted genes. Flu on the other hand is one of the fastest mutating viruses on the planet. Its why we have a forecast every year, and a different vaccine every year. It moves so fast. They both use RNA so they aren't incompatible, but the odds against them meeting each other in the same patient and fusing are astronomical." Woad said grimly. "Think my dear lad, take the evidence and try to piece it together in your mind."

"You're saying..." Ellis felt the color drain from his face. "Somebody made this?"

"Unfortunately. But I don't think they counted on the special infected. The reason why bioweapons were never used, despite the soviet union and united states making them in ton quantity during the cold war, is because they can't be controlled the way a gun or a bomb can. They can't make decisions like soldiers do. There's a chance that a bioweapon could end up destroying your entire country along with your enemy. Hell it took 50 years or more for the brittish to get rid of the anthrax they let loose on Grunard Island. They were lucky, sheep and horses were the only casualties. And it may not even have been our military. The soviets way back when, when their country fell, for a few months there was no security at any military base in the former soviet block, including the ones making bioweapons. Then there's the possibility of a doomsday cult, Oom Shin Rikyo had ebola in vials in their laboratory, but went with sarin because they couldn't aerosolize it properly."

Ellis could not absorb the possibilty that a human being could have done this to another. He looked down at the witch in the cage, at the IV in her arm, at the scars on her arms and legs. "Its not right." He gulped. His skin started to crawl at the thought. What if he'd been a little too faster or slower to get to that evac site on the Vannah roof? What would have happened if he had never met them? Would he be... like this witch? Could a carrier turn into a special infected at a later date? If the virus didn't get a chance to spread by being social what would it do next? His hackles stood up, and he almost missed Woad's response.

"No its not. And that is why caring people like you or I should care about a cure, and about making sure that our people are protected." H Doe growled a bit at Ellis. He crouched there distrustfully, staring up at Ellis' face while the young man fought with his terror. "Well now, thats another interesting change. He's watching your body language. I can tell you from experience they generally don't care. If you're running about and they can get a clear jump they'll do it. Even if it means smacking their faces on bulletproof glass."

"He's what?" Ellis turned to look at the hunter. "Seriously? You watchin my face?" He leaned down to get a better look, chuckling a bit. H Doe responded to this by looking away from Ellis' face and slicing at the glass in a surly manner. "Hey I recognize that from my sister's cat. He wouldn't look me in the face but boy he loved watchin when he thought my back was turned."

"yes well, the sounds they make the way they hunt, Hunters are definately cat like. We can trace infections by special infected onto humans for a short ways, make a rough guess what special type a person was infected by. But usually this fades to a baseline after awhile. All the folks in Seargant Carter's unit, most of them turned we monitored their change after a spitter wrecked their APC. And when they went out one by one it was similar. But thats how we know the ratio changes. The number of tires we've had them destroy. Its insane. Military hardware didn't grow on trees before the zombie apocalypse and it may as well be diamonds now." He hesitated. "If you're curious, I could try and trace it for you. It takes a couple months for the ratio to fade to baseline you might still have detectable markers indicating what infected you."

"Naw, I don't need to know when I was infected I am thats what matters now." Ellis looked down at the two special infected in the cages. "I ever meet the sons of bitches that did this to ya... they're gonna wish they were dead. I got lucky I guess, walked through fire and didn't even know it. But you guys got burned, so bad you don't even know what end is up." He put a hand to the glass of H Doe's cage. Ellis had this look on his face, like he was looking at someone dying in the hospital, rather than a zombie in a cage. "It just ain't right whats been done to ya. If we met on the street I'd still kill ya and you would me... but thats survival, and you been turned into an animal, you're so fucked up in the head ya don't know any better."

H Doe hesitated... and then carefully reached up, like he expected Ellis to hit him or something. But instead he put a grizzled, scarred, clawed palm up to the glass, up against Ellis' palm, with a quizzical look on his face.

"Mimickry is a good sign Ellis." Woad told him. "You should get to bed."

"Yeah... sure doc... might have trouble getting back to sleep." Ellis mumbled. He turned to go, stopping at the door to Woad's office. "Goodnight Mason, sleep well."

"Ni ni Elli." The boy yawned.

"Well, thats the first time he's called anyone by a nickname you know." Woad yawned. "I've set my phone to go off in two hours to check the witch's IV. Tempted to call her Morgain Doe instead of W Doe. But we'll see."

"Whassat from?" Woad's yawn was catching, Ellis stopped for just a moment to find out but he could already feel his eyes drooping.

"King arthur. You've never read any of those old stories? Morgain, Morgana, Morrigan, Morgan Le Fay, all names for the wicked witch that was Arthur's nemesis. Therefore its a fitting nickname to give a witch. And with more noble lineage than calling her Malificent doe or West doe. Why, the celts worshiped Morrigan as their angel of death. No wonder the midevil church made her a villain."

"Nuhuh, there's a morgan horse, that would be an aweful name to give a witch. Who wants to be named after a horse?" Ellis pointed out, "For now W Doe should be ok. Everyone would know who you were talkin about."

"Ah, fair enough. Goodnight Ellis. You're a good man. Most of the ordinary folk and the soldiers don't think much about the infected other than "will they kill me?" You, like those of us remaining from CEDA see a human suffering greatly."

"night doc, and thanks... I got a lot to think about." Ellis shuffled away to the half finished apartment he shared with the rest of his group. A tupperware container was waiting in front of their door, with a note. "Two for each of us." He looked up at the guard post, to see George looking in his direction. Ellis smiled and offered the man a thumbs up rather than shout. Ellis sat two snickerdoodles on the bedside tables of his companions and then set the container with his share on his bedside table. They barely stirred, although Ellis saw Coach's nostrils start twitching in his sleep. Even in his dreams Coach could pick up the smell of something delicious.

Ellis pulled the blankets up to his chin and rolled over onto his stomach, burying his face into his pillow. He had a real bed! Suddenly something so simple made him so happy! Ellis wiggled his toes into the sheets and snuggled his cheek up to the pillow and suddenly he was in a deep, dreamless, but blissful sleep.


	3. Non Standard Outcome

"So were they any good? Ya didn't get pinched or probed in the name of science? No weird tests and shit or freaky experimental guns?" Francis asked Rochelle as Coach sat down with Louis and a copy of "Peacecorps Schematics; apply engineering to survival!" to figure out how they were going to tow the One 4 All back to Florida.

"Nope, they're legit. Mind you they did want us to donate our blood for making blood serum, and the boys got their sperm frozen. The latter is probably not gonna last."

"No kidding, did it do anything?" Francis asked eagerly. "I mean I donated some of mine too, I even helped them put their primitive cartwheel centrifuge contraption together. I didn't think anything would come of it."

Rochelle chuckled, biting back a comment about how Francis probably donated tons of sperm in his lifetime what was a vial more? "Well, it made a hunter start paying attention to us, and a bunch of commons... and this witch..." She shivered. "They give me the creeps more than the others do.. urg except the jockey."

"You don't find the chargers creepy at all? They bellow like a freakin elephant crossed with a bird, they got no nose, and that arm makes me think they spent too much time jerking off..."

"Never thought of it that way. To me the Chargers are just big grey cannonballs you gotta dodge, and they'll run you over like the car they share their name with. I do know why their foreheads are so big though. But the one that caused more heebie jeebies than any other while we were there was the Smoker."

~flashback~

"hey Rochelle..." Ellis waded through the crowd of people either headed for the mess hall, for the walls for watch, for convoys, chores or classes. "Martin needs a muscle guy. Virgil is bringing in a medical emergency, probable carrier with gangrene."

"I'll tell Coach at breakfast, thanks for the cookies."

"Thank George, one of the watchmen. I helped him catch a witch last night that got too near the wall. You shoulda heard Mason. He sang note on just like one!"

"That kid is kinda creepy. Are they sure he's not an infected...?"

"Pffft, if there could be male witches you think we'd have seen any by now." Ellis told her. "But that hunter from their trials, you should go see him Rochelle. He actually started mimicking me last night."

"Seriously? that serum stuff must have fucked him up in the head." Rochelle sighed. "Good luck out there."

"thanks Ro, learn anything interesting I wanna hear it." Ellis hurried after Martin. Carter was headed in that direction as well. They got busy loading up one of the wood paneled pickup trucks to leave and Rochelle headed for the mess to get breakfast.

The smell of coffee met her nose as soon as Rochelle entered the cafeteria, making her start to salivate at the tempting aroma. Breakfast was fresh buttered bread, canned corn beef hash, some sort of pink banana that there weren't many of, hot cider, and it looked like they were cutting up tomatoes and vegetables for soup later that day. Coffee and tea were brewing. It was slightly better than a hotel breakfast but it was hot, this was the apocalypse, and Rochelle had been eating out of a can heated on a hot plate and MREs for months now. That, and any chocolate or potato chips they managed to get. Ellis had figured out how to 'hotwire' a vending machine and there had been some kerosene left in the food trucks at whispering oaks. But one inquisitive Jockey following his nose almost set the place on fire, and all they'd gotten out of it was a bag each of kettle corn and cotton candy. Hell Nick hadn't even gotten any, a Smoker had tried to grab him and when he dodged the tongue from Hentai Hell had grabbed the bag instead. The smoker had just stared stupidly at the bag but when Nick finally got it back the stuff was covered in smoker black tar. Rochelle had given him some of hers to make up for the loss.

"boo." Nick chuckled, giving Rochelle a poke as he sat down with her. Mari and a man who looked like he was related to her quickly claimed seats near Rochelle and Nick. Rochelle smiled into her coffee cup. "What's up?"

"Coffee. You know how long its been?" Nick took a long slow pull on his mug. "Jezus this stuff may as well be gold!"

"Yeah I mean... I did try. A bare can of sterno doesn't make very good hotel coffee and the way those things are packaged it was just... ew." Rochelle wasn't used to camp stoves, she'd almost burned herself trying to use sterno fuel.

"Yes but there's hotel coffee and then there's this coffee. And by the way, there's a reason why methanol fuels are hazardous, because they burn so hot just putting a tin of that shit on a wood surface can set it on fire." Nick had scavenged a couple hotel rooms worth of samples but those hadn't lasted very long either. A handful here a pocket's worth there, Ellis had emptied out one of the mini bars as they descended the Vannah. They'd been used to clean wounds and dull pain as they bolted desperately from safe room to safe room to get out of Georgia. The sterno had been found piecemeal, a can in the mall food court, a pack under a counter at whispering oaks.

Rochelle bit into one of the pretty little bananas only for her teeth to hit something hard. "What the..." She broke open the banana where she'd bitten it to find. "Is that a seed?"

Mari chuckled. "Commercial bananas are seedless, the seeds never grow to full size. But they're all genetically identical and were slash are being wiped out. These bananas, the trees are small so they're easy to manage but the seeds grow to full size. You can actually selectively breed them and even raise seedlings to trade. Hell most of the carriers that pass through here now just come because they want to trade for something. Break a leg? Trade for the medical care. Scavenge a good haul of fuel? Trade for seeds to start a garden. Find an ammo dump? Trade the calibers you don't use for the ones you do. Find a rare or obscure medicine? swap for a heal kit. You know how many old inhalers we end up finding just from traders coming through? Albuterol is a major stimulant, but it could give you a heart attack, its more or less useless if you don't have asthma."

"So why keep it?" Rochelle took a good long pull of her coffee before breaking a piece off the banana to eat. It wasn't bad at all actually. She pocketed the seeds for later, the gardens here had mostly been put on top of the asphault, no tilling just dump dirt in a box, maybe she could try her hand at growing.

"Because there never will be any again, not in my lifetime at least. Medicines, antibiotics, pesticides, sure the knowledge of how to make them isn't gone. But the machines, the feedstocks, the living experience of how to make them, those are all gone. Sure we haven't had an asthmatic survive yet but what if our kids or their kids develop asthma? We'll have nothing to help them, and have to watch them suffer. Sure chemicals eventually decay, but if its all you got, you use it." Mari frowned at the thought. "I was a physical therapist... I watched people use modern science and medicine to pick up the pieces from really horrible injuries. I can't do that for them anymore. I have to watch them struggle."

"So what you got a market or something?" Nick cast Mari a sympathetic glance, he didn't want to think about losses right now. Not when it became clear that 400 odd people were all that's left of the east coast and a population of a couple hundred million.

"Kinda..." Ricky made a "so/so" gesture with his hand. "The port where Virgil and the other traders tie up their craft to refuel. They sure as hell don't rest tied up in port. The infected could get them too easily. One Jockey in too good a mood, hunters won't chase something thats still, but the Jockeys always want to party."

"Thats one rude awakening." Nick shook his head. "Good strong saferoom door, not everyone's got one."

"pffft." Rochelle dismissed that comfort with a snort. "Those saferooms are hell to sleep in if the infected get riled. The doors ring."

"What are they made of anyway?" Nick wondered. "Diamonds or some shit?"

"Probably carbon fiber." A man in a mechanic's jumpsuit remarked as he passed them. "Ricky, your gear is fixed. And you were right, those riot suits are fixable. As long as they haven't been shot. As for the saferooms Carbon fiber is the same thing that makes stock cars able to take being rolled and the driver still walk away."

"Thats my cue." Ricky grabbed his plate, pulled a plastic ziploc bag out of his pocket, dropped his food in and chugged the last of his coffee. "Later sis." he hopped up from the table and headed out to his patrol.

"Is that why Ellis, no wait he totally fixated on that stock car because it belonged to Jimmy Gibbs I take it back." Rochelle sighed and shook her head with a smile. "I was gonna say maybe thats why Ellis suggested we take that car instead of one of the abandoned ones outside the mall but I take it back."

"He did what?" The Mechanic stopped and spun around on a heal, walking back towards them with a look of both horror and amusement. "did I hear that right? that your friend got you out of a mall full of zombies by um... borrowing... Jimmy Gibbs Jr's stock car?"

"yup." Rochelle giggled.

"Ballsy." The mechanic shook his head. "i'm surprised Jimmy gibbs didn't shoot ya."

"He couldn't, he turned into a zombie and the two yokels on our team turned into wusses and refused to fight back. Ellis was freakin punting the guy with the handle on his fireax. I had to do it, and I made a point of resenting it by tossing Coach the guy's head. I hate sports fans that go insane over their favorite atheletes. There's money to be had from catering to them sure but its NOT PRACTICAL IN A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. And I think thats what pissed me off about that incident the most." (1.)

"And I'm sure if you ended up fighting Derek Jeter's zombie over an autographed baseball bat of his you'd have no problem killing him." Rochelle meant it to be sarcasm.

Nick broke a piece off of his banana spat the seed into his hand and chewed on it a moment before saying. "oh tots, because I root for the damn Mets. Jersey boy. Notice one of the places I wished I were stranded in was atlantic city? Hell smashing zombie Jeter in the face might be a great photo op."

"Why do I even bother? Boys with their toys, even techies and suave gamblers that really don't have anything to prove aren't immune." Rochelle grumbled.

"Really so does that mean you'd..."

"Not a chance Nick. If I fucked you I'd be thinking of Francis' bulging pecks and big hands the whole time." Rochelle flicked a banana seed at Nick's forehead.

"I have big hands." Nick piped up with a mock pout on his face, pretending the seed had hurt worse than it did.

"And a big ego. I'd rather repopulate with a muscly party animal than a fellow snark case. The end of the world has way too much crying in it for me to want someone who's personality has so many traits in common with mine. Besides you and Ellis are the closest thing I have to brothers. I honestly don't find myself all that attracted to you because of that."

"Aw c'mon."

"Nick if you like them tall dark and exotic." Mari leaned in batting her eyelashes playfully. "And you aren't drunk, try chasing something further from home..." Nick thought for a moment she was going to kiss him. But then she put a hand on top of his head and gently pushed his face down so he was looking at his plate. "... just no booze, one of my few deal breakers. That, and not being chased for long enough." Damn he was actually going to have to get to know this Bombay bombshell? But... maybe it might be worth it... those hands made being swung around by a smoker way more bearable and she was smart /and/ liked his charms.

Rochelle laughed at the dreamy expression on Nick's face. A thin man with tiny wire framed glasses and owlish features sauntered over with a clipboard, spotted Rochelle, and waved to her to follow. "Yep I think I'm chasing Francis and leaving you two alone. Lets get out of here Lovelace you were gonna teach me how to use that ham radio?" She asked a man in owlish looking small lensed glasses who stopped by her chair.

"Francis... francis... why does that name coupled with your description sound familiar? hmmm..." Lovelace muttered as they walked out of the mess hall door. Rochelle grabbed another banana on their way out, glad to have made a new friend that didn't have repopulating the earth on his mind.

"Does he hate a lot of stuff and have tons of tattoos?" Rochelle asked hopefully.

"yes! he does! I asked him to write down his experiences traveling and he handed me an audio recording instead. Read every Batman story the library had, and thats my childhood collection in there. He's in the guestbook we keep! oh but he's not due through for a couple months at least. He's on one of the trading vessels we sponsor, small rig, they all are, called the One 4 All."

"You serious!?" Rochelle's eyes brightened. "Oh my god! And now with the cell phones out. DAMNIT."

"He signed the guestbook too, so did his friends... I think I might be able to help you but it depends on how much he absorbed by osmosis watching me teach his friends to use the ham radio. He's down in florida, they're trying to start up a homestead in the keys." Rochelle followed Lovelace up a set of stairs and ladders.

The construction got more DIY in appearance as they ascended, handcut lumber with the cuts uneven, nails and not screws, no finish and just a basecoat of paint meant for indoors on the outside. Finally Lovelace opened a door to a room with a half circle of offices and a ladder leading up. The names on the offices read "Mercer", "Carter", "Greyson", "Gleason" and finally "Lovelace." Lovelace had a large shelf of notebooks, an encyclopedia, a couple dictionaries, some military handbooks and a lot of Maps in plastic tubes or tacked on corkboards. "here. the guestbook from when he first arrived and... ah yes. This is the radio handbook we work from when setting up radio and relay beacons. Our recruitment beacon can be heard as far as the ozarks I'm told. After that we need a relay station, shame that. Where did Mercer say you were from again?"

"Ohio..." Rochelle felt a lump in her throat.

"blocked by the Ozarks, god damnit. There has to be a way. Ro, I won't give up. We have to expand our signal as far as we can anyway. Maybe when the com satilite opens up again. An hour maybe a day is how much we have and most of that is taken up with data transmission to and from Cheyanne mountain in wyoming."

"What's that place?" Rochelle asked curiously.

"Last outpost with non carrier military staff. They're very deep underground. There's a whole mountain of granite and multiple hermetic doors protecting it from the infected. It was built as a military command post in the event of nuclear war. I lay good odds it could take a direct strike from a tsar bomba headon and barely feel it."

"Now you're going into history I'm not familiar with." Rochelle arched a brow at Lovelace. "you are seriously going to need to bring me up to speed." She pulled out her old reporter's notepad and started writing. "So I get the impression Cheyenne mountain is important and old."

"yep, its like this, there are certain bases that would have been very important in responding to the green flu and a number of ceda military crossover projects that our groups were collaborating on..."

"Wait you're military?" Rochelle laughed. "You sure don't look it."

"Desert storm radio operator and computer analyst. I studied military tech stuff that broke to find out why and if it poses a threat to the troops. There's a famous error with a computer clock that almost destroyed a whole base. In Yugoslavia if I remember right. I might have got it wrong though. All i know is i get a call 'hey we have a screwed up computer lobbing surface to air missiles at our own people can you please proofread this?' One number was off. JUST ONE. I had to find one digit off in miles and miles of code with all regular english text blacked out for the sake of national security."

Rochelle chuckled. "Sounds like fun."

Mercer poked her head into the office and said quietly. "Do you have that report from Norad from yesterday?"

"uh yeah it wasn't good though. Satilite found a couple of Jockies bouncing around the sierra range. It jumped the Missisip just a week ago and its already there when it took months to GET to the big muddy in the first place. And now its starting to look like a couple of boomers made it into the caribbean. Sure they can't swim but their corpses are still infectious and they can float short distances and survive still. And if Europe decides to bomb us... just to kill the infected..."

"Not happening." Mercer said with a dark look in her eyes.

"no don't tell me."

"Came off the steppes of central asia. A case northwest of beijing in the middle of nowhere nobody caught until the village was gone. The chinese hid the case from us... pieces of shit. They didn't learn a damn thing from SARS NOT A DAMN thing." Mercer made a fist, taking slow deep breaths.

Rochelle just started to cry. She put her head down on the table and started crying. "We're fucked. The human race is fucked in the ass with an iron rod and we STILL can't get along with each other... shit... Lovelace I need to get drunk."

"I shouldn't but..." Lovelace opened a locked cabinet next to his book case. He pulled out a bottle of cheap vodka, two small canning jars that looked like they could hold two shots each, and a lime that looked like it was hard as a rock and starting to dehydrate. He opened a woodchip lined crate and pulled out a coconut. "you know what these are crying out for."

Rochelle burst out laughing. "doctaaaah is there nothing I can take..." she sang, rolling her eyes and laughing.

"We put the lime in the coconut and drink 'em both together." Lovelace half sang, half laughed.

* * *

Ellis slid off the pickup truck when they arrived back at Colony around midday, pissed as hell. Three mechanics ran over with a bucket of water each to cool the smoking engine. A blackened hunter's foot was sticking out of the hatch and a hunter sized dent was in the front hood of the truck. "Son of a!" He kicked the truck's tires. "FUCK THIS SHIT!"

"Ellis calm down." One of the mechanics sighed. "We've had this issue before. Hunters and Jockeys can't seem to resist trying to attack people through windshields, you wouldn't believe how many accidents we've had. You're lucky the truck drove away or we'd be looking at a rescue mission to haul your gangrene case out of there."

The doctors were wheeling the poor boy away on a stretcher. He didn't look much older than seventeen. He was delirious and his right foot was almost solid black. "How bad as he?" A second mechanic asked.

"Bad, they got the swabs they needed for a antibiotic resistance test on the way." Ellis kept his voice down. /Its not about you Ellis,/ He told himself. /or the truck or the infected, its about saving that kid's life. Be objective!/ "If he's been to india or china in the past six months they say it could be worse."

"Its pollution, antibiotics being found in rivers and lakes in southeast asia." The first mechanic shivered. "Germs are scary shit man. Hard to believe two or three pounds of them keep each of us alive."

"Listen... Ellis if you want to help with something useful, like research type useful." The second said quietly. "Take a break in the library with some of Lilly's lovely orange spice tea on the rocks and... look up Bacteriophages, then ask Lilly about her project with them way back when. She might have some mechanic fixing type stuff to do but even if she doesn't, she wouldn't say no to some samples or someone who knows his way around mechanical stuff. We're just too busy keeping patrols on the road and trying to get the material for biodiesel. More hands makes for light work and some of the projects they need... well we're not too familiar with that kind of machine. We're car guys, and kinda set in our ways."

"Like what?"

"um... stuff to try and cultivate samples, high powered microscopes tied to computers, stuff that might be refreshing changes of pace if we didn't have so much military hardware and wrecked up museum pieces in need of repair. From spinning wheels to cotton gins to horsedrawn plows and carts and hand crank appliances. We have to figure out a primitive way to make gun powder and restore really really old guns that you can hand make the ammo for."

"APCs, there's this one military tank we WANT so bad but its in the middle of a CEDA processing site. God damn we want that thing down here. Not that it would do much good but at least we can stash the kids in it while the infected are banging around outside the walls. Big guns small guns mollies jeeps choppers, diesel is always in short supply and brewing that is hell on our lungs."

Ellis sighed, leaving the men to vent about all the broken things that had to be fixed. The third mechanic shooed Ellis out of the garage. "Take a powder man you just rode shotgun on an ambulence run, I hear Lovelace has a fabulous liquer collection and a copy of every map mercer's ever made of the infection, you could get drunk and spend hours speculating about how badly we all got screwed at the same time!"

"or just grab one and party by myself." Ellis wasn't a drinker, sure a cold one now and again but not hard liquer. He shuffled his way higher and higher through the tower where fort colony's administration staff had their offices. But when he got to lovelace's office Ellis found Rochelle passed out at the table with a bottle of vodka in one hand and an open coconut in the other. "Lime in the coconut" was playing on an old CD player. Someone had pulled a blanket over Rochelle's shoulders and then he saw what had probably caused her to drink. "Jockies got that far west? why am i not surprised." Then he saw the report. "jeezus why do they all have to come outta china. Bird flu sars and now this?" He took the vodka and lime filled coconut out of Rochelle's hand and pulled out his music player. He punched a few buttons and put it by Rochelle's hand, then left a note. 'I totally suck at words, ellis.'" The words 'rise against' started scrolling across the music player's screen followed by 'life less frightening.' He took two gulps of the coconut concoction Rochelle had been drinking and then dropped it in the garbage can.

Out in the parking lot of the main colony building, Ellis could hear happy voices raised in song. "The moment to fight the moment to fight to fight to fight to FIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!" Looking down from the walkway he saw the sullen teenager with the samurai sword playing tag with the younger children and singing. One of only two girls in the game jumped in. "To the ends of the earth! Its a brave new world from the last to the first!"

"worth fighting for..." Ellis muttered as he wandered downstairs looking for the library. As he disappeared into the library he spotted Martin at one of the tables. He pointed to the desk, then at himself. Go there, then come here. Ellis waved and nodded, then put a finger on his lips to acknowledge that he knew to be quiet.

"So... please use this clipboard to sign in." The bored looking private at the desk muttered grumpily into his tea.

"uh... wow..." Nobody had cleaned the sign out sheet in ages. Ellis eyed the library, but he also hadn't used the dewey decimal system in years. There was a section of what looked like field journals and... "I can clean this out for ya, make some more sheets, where's the printer?"

"Wrecked last week when some dipass trader got drunk and in a fight with Ricky over it. Man i saw that fight coming a mile away they couldn't have taken it outside before the punches started flying. Not to mention Ricky's an elitist and crazy bad at picking people to pick fights with."

"Who Mari's brother?"

"Yeah, man if you have a record or a habit of doing stupid shit don't talk about it in front of Ricky. He may look skinny but he's got one helluva roundhouse and he's fast."

Ellis started flipping through the sign out sheet. "Well maybe I can do something about that printer, or maybe draw some up by hand or somethin." A single letter Z on the sheet caught his eye. He flipped back.

The entry read "Zoey- signed out - Eat 'em to Beat 'em, edible invaders of the florida keys" "Louis - signed out - Peacecorps Book of Schematics" "Francis - Batman, the killing joke" followed by "PS I hate spiderman, and spiders! Bats rule!" Huge eyed shock turned into a shit eating grin and Ellis dropped the clipboard and ran out yelling. "COAAAAAAAAAAAAAH COAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! SHE WAS HERE AND SHE'S GONE WE MISSED HER BY LIKE A DAY! A DAY COACH!" at a fork in the hallway one of the soldiers who had heard who he was yelling for simply pointed and Ellis ran that way without even slowing down. He ended up at the medical bay and found Coach in one of the rooms in the middle of giving blood. Lilly was smirking and saying something flirtatious and Coach's ears were pink. "COACH SHE WAS HERE SHE WAS HERE WE MISSED HER BY THREE FREAKIN DAYS ZOEY WAS FREAKIN HERE MAN AND I WAS LOCKED UP IN A CAGE!"

Coach facepalmed with his free hand. "Boy you been goin on and on about that girl. You take life way too fast! good relationships take a lot of time and a lot of luck."

"And giving blood requires a lot of fluids, hence why we save what little gatorade we have for people generous enough to give it." Lilly walked to a mini fridge and pulled out a 20 ounce bottle, shaking her head at Ellis. Lilly happily placed the bottle next to Coach, as though proudly bestowing a trophy or something.

"Hey get two cups I don't mind sharin." Coach eyed Ellis in a mixture of exasperation and amusement. "C'mon, we're teammates I'm not gonna hog 20 ounces of pure sweet hydration all to myself!"

"Hey... the guy virgil saved, any chance he..."

"dunno, his leg looked bad, all covered in black. And he doesn't speak english either."

"Well I know enough spanish to read the address on his ID." Lilly ventured, going to the clipboard on the nearby OR door. "He's from San Juan puerto rico. And I saw smoker bruises on his arm. So thats another place we know the infection got to."

"Isn't that a state?" Ellis asked curiously.

"They wish, they've been fighting about whether or not they want to be a state for decades." Coach chimed in. "But if he don't speak english he's gonna have a hard time here."

"Some of the soldiers that are local speak french. One of the traders knows how to order lunch and ask directions in Japanese. Virgil knows a couple sentances of cherokee for some reason. Language is going to be a huge problem if enough carriers from different places manage to survive." Lilly sighed. "And there's a rumor come down from Norad in Wyoming that the Chinese nuked their own cities when the infection took hold there. I heard Japan saw a spike in suicides too. People getting the infection and killing themselves rather than attack others and spread it to them."

"seppuku?" Coach asked sadly.

"Yeah sounds like." Lilly ground her teeth.

"What's that?" Ellis blinked.

"Ritual suicide boy... god bless 'em, in their place I think I'd be too chicken to do the deed." Coach shook. "Humans can get brave when they think they're dying, real brave, and stupid. But I can't fault them for doing it."

"and as curious as I am i'm not going to risk contaminating an OR to satisfy my curiosity." Lilly started disconnecting Coach from the needle. "I'm going to have this analyzed, then its either getting saved for someone who's injured or being centrifuged for serum. I know Mercer wants to put some in trank darts for a field test."

"if she does that let me know, I want in." Coach grinned.

"Me too!" Ellis added.

Lilly walked over to Coach with a small slip of paper. "Give this to the commisary, each donor gets two baskets and up to three rationed items. So don't... don't... DON'T waste it. There's some good gear in there, including repaired SWAT armor. Keep your fine ass from getting ripped up." Lilly thumped Coach on the shoulder. Coach poured two glasses of gatorade with a sheepish grin on his face and suddenly...

*BANG!* a huge puff of smoke came out of the OR. Lilly dove on Coach and Ellis, shoving them to the ground. One of the surgeons stumbled out. The other yelled. "CAUTERY LILLY GRAB THE LIGHTER!"

Lilly's pumps scrabbled on the tile as she ran into the operating room with a lighter and an open, unlit molotov. "WHAT HAPPENED!?"

"IT WASN'T JUST GANGRENE CAUTER THE STUMP!" The surgeon that stumbled out came running back in with a pair of gas masks and shoved one onto each of his colleagues faces. There was the woosh of fire. Ellis smelled burning flesh.

Ellis spotted a figure on the ground behind Lilly, he ran in to grab it. He knew that acrid scent. Smoker ichor. He grabbed the nurse and hauled him out of harm's way before Lilly came skittering out and hammered an air vent switch near the door. The smoke started getting sucked out. Ellis found himself staring at a blood pool, one he'd scrabbled through to try and help the nurse on the ground. The surgeon that ran out had a huge bruise rising on his cheek and neck. Ellis knew that pattern but... the boy he helped out of virgil's boat didn't look like he was turning or had a history, what was going on?

The nurse Ellis saved managed to regain his breath. "It shot out of the kid's leg! There was a freakin smoker tongue growing out of his LEG!"

"Get this to Woad immediately!" Lilly dropped the severed leg and section of tongue still attached to it into a biohazard bag and motioned to Ellis. "Ellis get something on your chest in case it breaks out!"

Ellis grabbed a nearby xray protection blanket, the ones with radiation shielding inside, lead maybe Ellis never cut one open to find out. Shaking like a leaf he wrapped the biohazard bag up in it and ran down the hall like he was carrying a ticking bomb. "DOC! DOC THERE'S BEEN AN INCIDENT!"

Woad took one look at Ellis' face, and the smoke covering his clothing. "My boy there's a chemical shower two doors down that way. Clean yourself up." He took the package without looking at what was inside.

Ellis heard his cry of surprise, irritation and excitement when he saw the severed leg but didn't bother to look up from the stream of water. "maybe Nick's got something with his issues with hand sanitizer and germs and shit."

When he walked out about fifteen minutes later Woad was on internal phone. "We can't put off raiding a hospital much longer Randy I know you didn't want to because of the infected volume... because if it spread to that boy it can spread to anyone who is attacked by a smoker with a cut on the attack site. We can't have tentacles growing out of people we need some way to stop the tumor if it turns out to spread... well it happened in dogs I don't see it being impossible with humans... yes it did, its like getting struck by lightning but it did... Randy fine, put it to a vote... but I'm telling you we cannot put off scavenging that hospital much longer! And it was a teaching hospital we could find useful long term items inside!" He hung up the phone a moment later. "Ellis I have hot tea... you should collect your wits."

"Doc?" Ellis asked. "What's that about?" He took the offered cup, breathing deeply of the perfumed steam coming off it.

"Old debate, Randy has to coordinate patrols I'm afraid and the hospital I'm after he doesn't want to visit... its where he found Mercer when the infection came. He booked it south from Philidelphia, but that place had a lot of cancer patients... I'm worried about this leg... i want chemo drugs in our pharmacy because that independantly moving giant tumor cell frightened the part of me thats a doctor."

"Lemme help doc... can that...?"

"yes, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you, coach lilly and my colleagues in there to keep a diary of your health. And I need as many smoker samples as we can get. Any show up on watch tell the men to kill them on sight, tell Phil about this and that I said to wear heavy canvas around your torso to absorb any smoker ichor. I want anyone with cuts and smoker wounds checked out. Run this up to the docs."

"you're saying... you think the kid caught his smoker tumor?" Ellis' jaw hung open.

"Regular cancer, once in awhile, can transmit. Its extremely rare. I remember a case where this cancer surgeon caught his patient's tumor. He had a cut on his hand and broke his glove during a procedure. They compared the DNA and knew immediately where the tumor came from. If I'm right, and the green flu increased the unpredictability of tumors in the smoker, it means anyone with a genetic predispotition to developing cancer could potentially catch this macro micro monster regardless of whether they're immune."

"not me... been four generations i think since... but then again nobody in my family talked about anything." Woad thumped Ellis on the back. "its alright my boy, let me unravel this..."

Coach looked like he was going to fall over as he and Lilly leaned on each other walking into the morgue. "That kid..."

"He didn't die did he?" Ellis demanded, whirling on the other two.

"No, he's gonna make it. He's in shock. Lovelace is trying to translate the papers he had on him, appearantly they're a medical chart for his mother's cancer. She was diagnosed as being terminal the same week the greenflu took hold in Philidelphia." Lilly shook. "There was a referral, they flew her in, but her flight was canceled at the air port. The tickets were still in the folder."

"And I'm going to need to examine you both for cuts, Ellis run this up to Mercer tell her I said for Randy to tighten his belt or get out of the way." ellis looked down at the note. 'Tell Randy to get his head out of his ass, or just kiss the fellow and say you forgive him.' The note said. 'We need those cancer drugs now. We can't wait on field trials anymore. This one actually scared me. If i'm right, the forecast could include oncological lightning.'

Ellis shoved the note in his belt and ran up the hallway towards the makeshift staircase to the offices. He got up the stairs but then heard Mercer's voice and looked back. She was in the yard working on some kind of hand crank device covered in sterile chemistry jars. It looked like it was made out of a wagon wheel. He gauged the distance to the ground and the tree that came precariously close to the admin tower then called out. "DOOOOC DOC MERCER!" and slid down it, running over.

"Ellis? are you alright, you look like you've seen a ghost." One of the assistants, a wiry man in jeans and a t-shirt with a faded CEDA ID attached to his belt immediately took over for Mercer.

Ellis shoved the note into her hands. "Woad looks really upset. That kid virgil brought in! A smoker tongue was growing out of his leg but he wasn't turnin!"

Mercer sighed as she read the note. "Really... I'm not going to make a romantic move on Randy just so Woad can..." She facepalmed a minute, rubbing her forehead. "What does Woad say about this?"

"He thinks it could spread without the green flu..."

"Of course he does... Woad specializes in history of epidemics and one of the bits he takes pride in is understanding non standard outcomes. Being an ME just puts food on the table for him, the odder a situation the more he likes to study it."

"What what?" Ellis tried to understand. "i got the history bit."

"Non standard outcome, like a rabies flu hybrid showing up and making zombie mutants in addition to killing us all."

"The specials Ellis." Nick wobbled over from one of the pickup trucks used for ferrying people and supplies with a huge box of sterilized lab glassware on his shoulder. He hauled it to a table with several more boxes of similar equipment. "Stuff that isn't likely but causes a lot of damage is a non standard outcome. Its like this stupid statistics story I tell around halloween about red and blue doors, cthulu and odds on how soon the world is gonna end and we're all gonna die." (2)

"It was crazy shit man! A smoker tongue came out of this boy's leg... wait why do you do math you were a..."

"I needed to know how to calculate odds." Nick cut in evasively. He plucked a bandana from his belt and started wiping sweat off his face. He nudged Ellis "accidentally" with his elbow while doing so. "shhhh..." He hissed. "well as far as non standard outcomes go that would definitely be one." he peered at Ellis' expression. "you aren't joking are you?"

"no nick! It was nuts! the ER was filled with smoke and... the damn kid's leg was severed and the tongue was still wiggling!" Mercer had her hand on her chin while Ellis just shook his head. "Its like the habit of smoking itself has a mind of its own and... shit I'm all freaked out."

Nick looped an arm around Ellis' shoulders reassuringly. "Easy buddy easy..."

"I know right... i fought zombies and i'm scared of a freakin zombie tumor... why?"

"We call it Colony Crazies." Mercer's assistant piped up. "you have civilization again so you start processing the things you saw and the mask created by the need for survival fades away, replaced by grief, fear and zest la vive."

"Alright, I'm going to have the town council meet and put the screws to Randy."

"Don't." Woad strode towards them in some kind of cloak and with an enormous walking stick.

"oh cool Doc thats badass!" Ellis exclaimed, jealously eyeing Woad's traveling outfit. Woad was wearing a cloak made from heavy oily looking robinhood green wool. He'd made a ceda hazmat helmet into a camel back style slingpack with a straw that meant it could probably double as a water carrier and a backpack. Underneath the cloak was a poncho of patched together hazmat suit pieces. He had a bandolier of bile jars looped around his shoulder and stomach, the caps of the jars seemed to be a slightly different color of steel or glint somehow in the way that normal bile jars didn't. Then Ellis spotted a quartet of 9 volt batteries and a coil of copper wire near the top of the bandolier. Of course! He made the lids of the bile jars out of something attracted by magnetism so that the bile jars could just clip into place! Woad covered his face with a broad brimmed hat dyed the same green. He carried an enormous, dense looking walking stick, in fact it looked dense enough to lay out a charger if the angle were just right.

"Ethan you are not going and thats final!" Mercer scolded. "Just let me at..."

"I didn't mean that I was leaving." Woad gave her a wry smile. "Its unfair of me to have you do my screw turning for me. Just wait out of sight and be ready to do some... what do the kids call it now, some 'emoting?' And Ellis thank you for your vote of confidence, this thing has taken more spitter acid and boomer bile than any four of my normal working suits combined. The infected seem to have a bit of trouble understanding that this pads their attempts to beat me to death. Its saved my life more than once by putting the 'play dead' option on the table."

Mercer chuckled.

"Hey I'm going." Ellis piped up. "Might be something interesting in there."

"Me too i wanna see if i can scavenge some hand sanitizer, maybe something to brighten up my suit too." Nick grumbled. "I'm just glad its so hot down here in the south or it would never have dried but the color's still... ick..."

"Nick stop obsessing over how you look, you call my friendship with Keith a mancrush when you talk like that?" Ellis glared at the conman with a slightly disapproving shake of his head.

"you don't get it, when you meet someone for the first time you got at most 30 seconds to make a good first impression before their subconscious mind locks that image of you in forever."

"does not you're just imagining things."

"no really, its been scientifically proven."

"whatever. I can't believe you only want to help Woad go scavenging because you want more hand sanitizer."

"Alright alright I admit to curiosity. Also seriously, contagious smoker cancer that makes a tongue come out of random parts of your body... seriously... that is nightmare fuel and having a better pharmacy seems like a good way to stack the odds in our favor."

"We need a refrigerated transport case too, which means ice from the kitchen and a cooler." Mercer mused, already making plans for the trip.

"You aren't going to try and get the experimental antibodies." Woad sputtered. "When they did a trial of that formula they nearly lost four people."

"I don't plan on using them. Not at the level of development they're at, goodness no that would kill any healthy enough sod that took them. It could kill, but its a line of research well... I think its worth preserving. My way of paying homage to my profession, much like us paying homage to early american farmers by using their equipment to replace our normal blood centrifuges."

They wound through the hallways of the main clinic building after Woad until they reached the mess hall. Randy was hanging his hat and coat in the mudroom just outside. He saw who was coming, and he saw what Woad was wearing.

"no no no Ethan I said no!" Carter groaned. Ellis blinked curiously, looking from Randy to Mercer to Ethan and then at Nick for some kind of direction. Nick's eyes flicked to the look of annoyance on Mercer's face. "Nora you can't possibly be going with this those smokers damn near strung you up! And the volume of spitters in that hospital... there is no way Ethan could survive he's too old and too slow and we NEED him."

"Are you sure this is about me? Or is this about your guilt?" Doctor Woad asked coldly. "I need to advance my research Randy. I told you last week I've hit a wall in my research on the smoker and now we have extremely rare oncological phenomena showing up on our door step on the backs of them! I'm going with or without your help, so if you don't want your only medical examiner to die either give me a hand, or let me find a fourth man or woman for our team so we can do the job properly!"

"Fine, on one condition." Carter snapped. "You take the next 48 hours to prepare. And Nora and I aren't going."

"You're going to decide FOR me Randy?" Mercer demanded. "Seriously? I'm a grown woman. I wasn't planning to go so its not going to be a problem, but the brass ones you must think you have if you think that ordering me around like this is going to keep me safe!"

Ellis' head went back and forth back and forth from one speaker to the other. "Is it just me or is there something about this hospital they don't want to deal with?"

"Ellis its the romance movie you missed but that everybody who's been to one knows the ending of all of them." Nick rolled his eyes. "A great big steamy makeout scene then a year later the gal wakes up alone with a kid and everyone treating her like shit for having a kid out of wedlock. you know, THOSE kinds of romance movies. So doc who are you taking?"

"If you guys don't mind I was going to ask Rochelle to find some parts for me." Lovelace said quietly behind them. Ellis jumped. Lovelace and Rochelle stood behind him, the latter looking at the floor rolling his music player around in her fingers. "I'm not the only one complaining, Lilly wants some parts to build a video uplink to Norad so she can send them microscope slides. Saint James, where Woad wants to go was one of the specialist research hospitals the military fortified at the start of the infection, all the radio parts the two of us need for our projects should be there."

"yeah then why isn't your scrawny little ass coming with us instead of putting our buddy in harm's way?"

"James isn't all that dangerous at night, the smokers and spitters have trouble seeing you if you sneak around the back. Randy just has issues with that spot that make him unhappy." Carter glared resentfully at the neraby wall. "But besides that its part of the homework I gave her, get the materials for her own ham radio setup and get it working.

"Besides, I can't let you boys have all the fun. I wanted to be a newscaster, but a ham radio relay is in kinda the same vein just more primitive."

"And I can sponsor my share of the cost of the trip. I have a box of scrap copper, enough to make a miniature distilling pot you could hang on a camp fire. Thats useful for purifying water."

"I can work copper." Ellis chimed in. "Sounds like a deal to me. You'll show me the design? I could make a bunch of them if they're simple enough depending on whatchu got."

The two shook on the deal.

"Fine, fine! Just..." he looked over at the tenseness in the mess hall. "... this way people are reassured." Lunch was half over. Nick had forgotten most of the time he was in the field that he had a watch. And suddenly he turned his wrist to check.

It was broken though, like everything in this world that men wanted. "um... do any of you guys know someone who can fix this? and what their preferred barter thing is?"

Ellis chuckled. While Woad said quietly. "That would be George, his family owned a pawn shop. He's got very deft fingers if anyone can fix a watch its him. And what he likes is cinnamon, so he can make his mother's snickerdoodle recipe."

Nick spotted Mari and a man in a labcoat he didn't recognize heading for the kitchen. She spotted him and waved. "aaand time to make a move." Nick wandered over with a cocky smile on his face, smoothing his hair out.

Rochelle and Ellis looked at each other and snickered as they heard Mari say. "Hey Nick this is Thompson, he's the company shrink. We were just trying to figure out an appointment for your anxiety attacks."

Nick's face turned a furious red and Ellis almost choked with laughter. "Good luck Nick." Rochelle teased.

Coach wandered up then, drawn by the smell of lunch. "So... what'd I miss?"

"Where were you?"

"Giving blood, and this afternoon I'll be helping Lilly with her botany class..." Coach grinned, and Rochelle thought she saw a smitten gleam in his eye. "She's got young willow trees she wants to use to break up smoker and spitter fire near the edge of the wall. Then tomorrow, we're doin some buildin."

Ellis shook his head. "My grandpa worked willow when I was little, it was real light and soft. I could carry a log twice as big as I was and six inches across like it was a plastic toy. A charger could knock that over real quick. Hell once I broke one over Kieth's head and he was on his feet a minute later!"

"Its not for Chargers, smokers and spitters who can't get a clear shot won't make it. The chargers we're installing oak spikes on the wall for." (3)

"now oak is the exact opposite. So they do know what they're doin then." Ellis nodded sagely.

"hey Ellis you haven't told a one of your Kieth stories till now." Rochelle eyed him curiously. "you feeling alright?"

"I dunno... I'm just so curious about everything going on I haven't thought about Kieth much. My parents maybe a bit but... thats private. Hell just trying to figure out what's going on with H. Doe and Mason bends my brain backwards into shapes I don't quite like. Then this business with the smoker tongue shooting out of that kid's leg."

"You're actually learnin somethin boy." Lunch was lentil soup again, some sort of apple pear sauce for a sweet, and a chunk of some kind of fish with lemon and... fresh pepper? Yeah that was the strongest pepper smell Coach had smelled in a long time. Was that fresh from the tree? Coach tried to get a look in the kitchens to get a preview of dinner. A real man couldn't live on nothing but lentils!

"Tonight... at 7." Nick groaned, plunking himself down with the rest of his group. "What I miss?"

"Ellis talking about how he was so curious at all the things going on at the fort he hasn't felt the urge to tell a Kieth story."

"Shutup Rochelle." Ellis grumbled.

"And I donated blood today." Coach was really hurrying his meal. "And now I'm even hungrier than usual and stuck running on lentil soup. Comforting, but a man needs some meat in his diet."

"The former, is the best news I've heard all day." Nick groaned. "I hate shrinks. I don't like people poking around in my head. Did your mama do this, was your daddy in your life. Fuck me..."

"niiiiiiiiiiiick." Ellis whined. "C'mon guys, there was a freakin smoker tongue coming out of a kid's leg. You aren't bothered by that?"

"I wish i could say I wasn't." Rochelle said darkly. "Ellis and I did find the same piece of information seperately though. Remember our friends from the bridge?"

"Greasy monkey, office jockey and bratty track suit yeah I remember."

"They're running a scavenge and trade outfit going to all the islands in the carribean that the infection hit to scavenge and putting up a homestead."

"Seriously? Monkey sure doesn't look like he can grow his own bananas." Rochelle elbowed Nick hard in the ribs.

"I even found out what area they're working out of, the Florida keys. Zoey signed out a book on invasive species of florida." Ellis kept his voice down, but his grin was enormous. "We can finally meet on the same level, without having to shout up a bridge oooh this is gonna be fun."

"Lovelace says they left the week we were in detention in Randy's brother's base." Rochelle added. "We missed them literally by a few days."

"So are you suggesting we go the same route? Join up with them to make a bigger outpost or something?" Nick asked curiously.

"No, not really, but it means we have options if we need to leave somewhere." Rochelle explained. "Colony operates a trade network. They're trying to expand. I saw the map in Lovelace's office, they have two outposts, one in the north near Lake Ponchetrain, the other on the shoreline on the south side of the city for boats."

The four of them looked at each other. "Even if we do decide to start up our own trading group, we'd still need a market to sell those supplies to and a starter fund. I say we put this idea to one side for now." Coach cautioned them. "If we are gonna do that though we can take steps to prepare now though."

"How about trading for some privacy?" Nick suggested hopefully.

"Surely Mari has some." Ellis said with his mouth full of fish.

"CLOSE. YOUR. MOUTH." Growled Nick. "And thats not what I mean... running with you guys is the least amount of privacy I'd ever had in my life. Honestly I'm surprised I haven't gone batshit insane between Ellis and the zombies... urg the worst was that fucking themepark. The only bright parts of it were scrounging up some decent food from the tents and getting to play with the pyrotechnics at the abandoned Midnight Riders concert."

"I was just sad to see it like it was." Coach sighed. "But at least you got something out of it huh?"

"Why so sad about it Coach?"

"Well i tell you what, you tell me about watching the infected run through and wreck a place you enjoyed as a kid and see how sad that makes you? I could point to a dozen places where my friends and I had an absolute blast. I had to leave all my old pictures behind. But my memories of the place were clear as day, and everywhere, like ghosts."

"Sorry Coach." Rochelle said quietly.

"So... that radio operator, he manage to get as far as Ohio?" Ellis asked Rochelle worriedly.

"Not even close, their signal hasn't penetrated the Ozarks yet. They need a beacon to be set up on an elevated hill."

"I hope your folks are okay." Ellis said quietly. "What made you get drunk?"

"Wait what? Rochelle got drunk? Rochelle miss look out while we all down a nip in the saferoom so we don't lose our heads and do something dangerous? Got drunk?" Nick laughed.

"Satilite photos from Norad." Rochelle said darkly. "Two Jockies on a mountain out in California. One of them still had his ski goggles on."

"But... it took weeks to cross the east coast!" Coach sputtered.

"Nice flat plains, a hunter and a couple of Jockies could cover that distance. Pretty quickly." Nick shook his head. "Never underestimate the speed of a creature that runs. I learned that the hard way at more than once racetrack."

"Yeah well it gets worse, China hid cases from the rest of the world. And appearantly Mercer wasn't surprised by this at all." Rochelle had this dark expression on her face, she'd been hoping somehow that the green flu would stay in the Americas, that somewhere out there the great cultural centers of Europe and the creatures of Africa and the outback of Australia with all its kangaroos would somehow still continue on in spite of it all.

"again, not a surprise." Nick grumbled. "The chinese are very secretive and they hate americans prying into their business. Not something I like to hear though, sounds like the whole world might be having their eyes on this place."

"Also, during the sars outbreak... China hid how many cases it had. Odds are, they wouldn't ever admit how bad they got until the infected completely steamroll them." Rochelle put in.

"You're missing the worst case scenario still." Nick swallowed a big bite of his fish. "Look what's the worst thing you've ever heard of one country doing to another? Not people, not terrorist groups... one country."

Ellis shook his head. "I dunno, I can think of some stuff..."

"NUKES!" Hissed Nick. "Think about it!"

The other three turned white. "then why..."

"I dunno... I did notice a bunch of iosat tablets and prussion blue when Mari took me to get a change of clothes. Marked as medical but they looked like an afterthought." Nick shivered. "Who knows, maybe a dark daydream of the folks here."

"What what now? What's a dye got to do with nukes?" Ellis demanded. "That stuffs paint ain't it?"

"Its used to treat exposure to some radioactive isotopes." Rochelle spoke up. "Before going out to Savannah I was learning the basics of something called 'Cog' continuity of government. Its the government's response plan to survive a global disaster. Mostly radioactivity but they had other scenarios... research was yielding more and more things that could kill off the human race and the government didn't like that. Ronald Reagan had the most controversial, because he called for completely abolishing civil liberties. No bill of rights. But it didn't die with the cold war. Every president had to come up with his own."

"daaaamn." Ellis shook his head.

Nick sighed, pushed his plate back, and walked away. "I'm gonna take a nap, got a shift up on the walls in an hour. This took a morbid turn..."

"Coach." Lilly bumped the back of Coach's chair with her hip. "The kid's awake from his surgery. Lets go bring him some food. Not solid mind you but the smoothie I put together should perk him right up."

Coach grinned toothily up at the nurse. "Sure thing. I've never met a bad mood the right cookin couldn't turn around."

"Rochelle you missed it!" Lovelace beamed, striding towards her. "The general in charge of Norad actually apologized to Mercer!"

"for what?" Rochelle asked curiously. Ellis perked his head up from his plate, the lentils nearly gone.

"For accusing her of lying to get her way with how to handle the infected. She told him about the specials awhile back and he damn near shit a brick." Replied Lovelace with a chuckle. "He's sent some surveyors out he discovered had the carrier gene and they're mapping damage and trying to find other carriers. They're heading south for us. I saw their route. In four months they're going through the Ozarks..."

"What we wanted... are they still in contact?"

"No they're on the road. If you talk to the general, he's using the satilite network."

"Alright, I'm not sure if they're alive but I need to get a signal home if I can." Rochelle ate the last few bites of her fish and got up from the table, running off after Lovelace to see if Norad could help her find her parents.

Ellis sat there alone, then he got up slowly, looking around. He realized he could hear at least four different American accents. Even a boston yawl somewhere in the kitchen. "A penny for your thoughts my boy?" He hadn't noticed Woad walk up to him.

"People are here from all over... it never hit me... just how few of us were left. A whole empty world with nothing but the infected, and all we got is this one little spot."

"Well my boy, you wouldn't be the first person in history to feel small." Woad smiled, leaning on his walking stick. "But I... have a device I need you to work on repairing for me, might distract you from your troubles. Been sitting there since we took this place. Hauled in from a laboratory across town by some of Allen and Randy's fallen brethren. Heavy monster but it won't work."

"Sure doc lemme have a look."

"And if you show a knack I'll have you fix more lab machines for me. The greasers down in the motor pool, they're so posessive of their cars. I don't blame them, and I wouldn't disturb them. I'm just sad I don't have the model T I restored."

"You restored a car doc?"

"Seemed a shame to leave it to rust. I admit I didn't have any idea of what i was doing. But alas, a tank decided it was a good missile. Only survived because Allen put a bullet through the tank's eyes. It couldn't see me and calmed down."

"Gonna have to try that trick sometime." Ellis could feel himself brightening up already. Maybe this afternoon wasn't going to be so bad after all. "hey I don't mind doin more work for ya doc, whaddyou got?"

* * *

1\. see dead center sfm by beejie bean, since she was using recorded lines and trying to piece them together in a story that made sense I figured it would be helpful to just go with her version. also us nick fangirls gotta stick together :E

2\. The carter catastrophe, or doomsday catastrophe, see youtube video "doomsday catastrophe" by Isaac Arthur. It talks about the question of whether the extinction of the human species might happen soon or in the far distant future

3\. actually thats how they're supposed to be played... but I once met a guy who was impatient and faster than his whole team that insisted on getting right up in my face as the spitter. He did not do more than spawn a death pool. XD one katana strike and he was gone. cool guy though, just impatient!


	4. Global

AN: Just a tiny aside since i got a great review last chapter. I do have voices in my mind for Woad and Mercer. If you want to know who, play fallout 4 and just... go look at the safehouse list in the Railroad HQ. :D names will all become clear. As for woad. i'm gonna put a little easter egg and you can guess who his voice actor is supposed to be.

I also take some inspiration, in terms of the people and society developing at Fort Colony, from the Pernese society in the book series "Dragonriders of Pern" by anne mc caffrey, a book series I can't reccomend enough, rest Anne's soul. Many of the same elements are in lepers. A charismatic soldier with major leadership chops, an intelligent headstrong female counterpart to him, wise old craftsmen who are the best at what they do and dedicated to guiding and teaching their communities.

There's also a literary reference in Randy Carter's name. Randolph Carter is the character HP Lovecraft used as a self insertion protagonist in his stories. If you want to hear Lovecraft's work, the youtube channel Horror Babble regularly produces audiobook performances of his work. Be warned that Lovecraft had very specific hangups about race and typecasting that would be socially unacceptable today. View with historical context from his era, the 1920s, and procede with caution if you're easily triggered.

 **~Present~**

"Soooo..." Coach had gone to hook their boat to the One 4 All. "Can you... tell me about Francis?" Rochelle asked Louis with a nosy expression on her face.

"What about him?" It looked like the tips of Louis' ears were pink.

"Like where he's froooom, did he have a girl friend, what were his family like."

Louis laughed. "He's from Philly like us, his girlfriend turned into a zombie and bit him, thats how he got infected, and his family well... he never talked about them. Francis is a bit of a punk, but he hates being lonely." Louis added. "But what makes you think I'd know anyway?" A really big blush was creeping up his cheeks.

"Cause you guys are all friends. I mean on the trail you must have been close." She peered up at him, "Louis why are you blushing?"

"no reason." Yep, Louis was slowly turning red under his dark skin.

"You guys aren't gonna get jealous are you? If i start trying to get Francis' attention?"

"Me? no, why would you say that?"

"Because of the color rising in your cheeks every time I pry a little deeper?" Rochelle smirked. "C'moooon, if you like me just say so. I have to keep my options open after all."

"NO NO NO um... its not that. Just... before I tell you you have to understand... Francis and I thought we were going to turn... we didn't want to be alone..."

Rochelle blushed furiously and started giggling. "Oh my god... you slept with him? Was he good? He does have big hands."

"All the things you could say and you want to know /that/? Fine... yes he has a big dick. Yes he is good. No we are not currently seeing each other. It wasn't serious." African american culture, and southern culture in general, wasn't known for being all that accepting of homosexuality. There was an unspoken expectation that you 'be a man' and 'settle down' get an education, get a job, get a house with a white picket fence and show your white neighbors in suburbia that you were black and just as smart and well off as they were. Louis didn't agree with it though. He just wanted to be normal. Fuck all these old fashioned unspoken rules about where young black men were expected to go and where failure to do so would take them. "Just... I really don't want to think about it anymore. I enjoyed what we did, it was comforting. But death never came, we never turned. We figured we'd wait to turn and then eat a bullet. But it didn't happen." Louis rolled up his sleeve and showed Rochelle the scar on his arm. "I got bit within days of the start of the infection."

"Wow, so you were there? At ground zero?" Rochelle's eyes widened.

"Yeah, four densely populated cities in close proximity and connected by public transit; Philidelphia, Newark, Trenton and New York City. I was from Philly. Now... I guess I'm from wherever I am." Louis realized he'd been looking at his feet. "Rochelle look, I don't want to talk about it, what I do want to know is what they found out about the infected."

"Well, that I can tell you..."

 **~flashback~**

Ellis had stepped back a little ways while Woad had a talk with Nick and Ricky on their way to their afternoon guard shift. Whatever deal was struck the two of them shook hands on it, and Nick suddenly seemed to become more focused. Woad handed over two small boxes with some sort of warning label on it and rejoined the Mechanic. "There we go... come my boy I'll show you the Major."

Woad lead them past his office and the morgue, "I've still got to clean up that leg..." He eyed the now inert limb on the autopsy table. He counted the doors on the hallway until he got a little ways past his. "This was my last assistant's office. Poor Danielle wasn't able to fight as well as you. And this is her toy, the Major, its a mass spectrometry device. You put an unknown substance through this, and it tells you all the chemicals making up its physical form, including a limited sample of biological materials including amino acids and common viruses. She programmed the molecular signature of the green flu's protien shell into it not long before she passed."

There were a bunch of stuffed toys and some goth looking decorations hanging on the walls. Ellis picked up a stuffed toy hippo sitting on the spectrometer. "Cute..." He squished it to see how worn the stuffing was and the hippo made a fart noise. "For real!?"

Woad nodded. "oh Dani loved that toy. Leant it to newcomers in emotional distress. She loved children, left an infant son behind, not even a year when the infection started. Passed her immunity onto him." Woad had a sad look in his eye. "The office is not as merry without her. I'll leave you to have a look at it, the manual should be on the shelf above her desk. If things work out with this job you can box up the decorations and I'll give this office to you. I know you like cars but we need delicate equipment repaired badly."

Ellis nodded and went to the shelf. Sure enough a number of manuals for lab equipment including the mass spectrometer were lined up neatly. He pulled the one he wanted off the shelf, then opened an access panel to the machine's inner workings and started comparing the pieces.

* * *

Coach entered the boy's hospital room with Lilly and Lovelace. "Please tell me one of you speaks spanish?"

"Kinda with enough time to frame a sentance." Lovelace held up a worn out Spanish dictionary. "I know how to conjugate and I know the grammer."

The boy did turn out to speak Spanish, after Coach tried to make conversation with what little vocabulary he had in the language it turned out the boy knew a few sentances in english, food words and greetings and that was about it. After some work Lovelace and Lilly managed to write a message in spanish that translated into...

 _Welcome to Fort Colony, New Orleans._  
 _I am Lilly, a Nurse. I am deeply sorry for the loss of your leg. You had a strange mutation coming out of it and we felt it was safer to remove it. Can you tell me what happened?_

It took a few minutes, the boy gulping at the smoothie like it was the first cold fluid he'd had in his life and as he did so he worked on his response.

 _I am Peter, from San Juan, my mother turned and bit me on the leg._

Lovelace translated the message, Coach blinked at it. "Smokers don't have females."

Lilly took a deep breath, dictated the next message, and Lovelace answered.

 _We have never seen a female smoker, is something odd about your mother's medical history? We need to know how that specific mutation happened. Any detail is useful._

The boy read the message, he was still very pale looking under his tan and very thin.

 _She had a histerectomy, uterine cancer, shortly after having me. She developed elevated testosterone levels that medicine couldn't bring down._

Lilly nodded eagerly. "The doctors will be glad to hear this... grim though it is. We already know Green Flu wrecks the endocrine system." She took quick notes, "ask him if we can take the medical files he had on him for his mother, and where he was when the disease started showing up."

Lovelace nodded and managed to translate the message using a dictionary. The boy blinked and replied on the notepad.

 _If you give them back you may take them, we were at the airport, we were going to Philly but all the flights were canceled a gringo got off the plane and started a fight. He slugged my mother! What did she ever do to deserve this? She was not pretty towards the end I know, but God left her her grace!_

Lilly's next question was. _How did you survive?_

 _I hid in El Yunque, the zombies couldn't move fast in the jungle, too thick. Its a national forest, I know i shouldn't have hunted or camped in there but I needed to eat! I was frightened. I stayed away and hid when people showed up._

Coach, Lilly and Lovelace looked at each other. "I'll keep working on this and sit with him. You two have a science class."

Coach nodded. "hope the kid's ok. Take care Lovelace." He looked over at Lilly and asked. "What's El Yunque?"

"I always do. Things require a delicate touch more often than most of us want to admit."

"He has the carrier gene, not the markers for a smoker, so he probably won't turn." Lilly assured Coach as they left. "As for El Yunque, its a national forest, the only tropical rainforest on US soil. The terrain is rough, even for the most agile of infected. It rains every day, its quite slippery, the undergrowth is dense so it would break up smoker and spitter line of sight. The only downside is the risk of secondary illness. If a tumor took hold on him like that it means something, stress probably, reduced his immune response so that his immune system either didn't find or didn't recognize the tumor cells."

Lilly lead Coach to a corner of the gardens with three large geodeisc dome greenhouses. In the middle was a work area and a two or three foot deep pond with some sort of fish Coach didn't recognize in it. The domes were about the diameter of the pickup trucks used for patrols and scavenging with a vent above the doors. Behind one of the green houses Coach caught a glimpse of some kind of plaster or clay mound and when he looked around the other side of the greenhouse he saw a large earthen oven. A half circle of two dozen teenagers, including Martin and six teenage girls, one wearing a tattered "volunteer" t-shirt, was waiting in the work area. "Kids we have a possible new teacher learning his way around, this is Coach."

There was a cautious murmer of greeting. "Hey kids, nice to meetcha. I taught physical education and health in Savannah, Georgia." Coach was used to teenage antics, it served him well with Ellis and it would now.

"If things work out with Coach we'll have him teach you kids combat basics, target practice, weight training, that sort of thing." Lilly beamed. "But for now, we have plants to check and vegetables to pick. You have your assigned garden beds and we have some hot pepper seedlings that need to go into the bed. First though, we need to review. Lets see... who can tell me the latin name for crops in the tomato family, and where they primarily come from?"

The girl in the volunteer t-shirt raised her hand. Lilly pointed to her. "Solanum, most of which come from the Americas. The exceptions are eggplant and belladona. Eggplant has traveled throughout southeast asia and Europe and Belladona is poisonous. The solanum family includes peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and a number of smaller fruits that never caught on."

"Right, so who can tell me about Belladona? Why is it planted in small numbers outside the wall despite being poisonous?"

Martin raised his hand. "Its used to harvest the medication Atropine, used for dialating the pupils in the eye for examination. Because of that the WHO considered it an important medicinal herb to preserve."

"Correct. What family contains cucumbers? Who can tell me about it?"

The surly looking boy with the samurai sword raised his hand. "Curcubitacae, the gourd family, containing pumpkins, squash, gourds, cucumbers and melons."

"correct, they exist on both mega continents, and consist of roughly 975 species, but humans only cultivate a fraction of those. Who can tell me why thats a bad thing? Anyone?"

Three kids raised their hands, and when called on they responded in unison, as if they'd worked very hard to reherse their reply. "Genetic diversity allows for greater resistance to disease and extreme weather. Regionally raised cultivars and plants are the best..."

After about five minutes of this sort of review everyone scattered to a set of garden beds. The kids all had critter keepers, magnefying glasses, and a notepad and instructions to find an insect, draw it, and identify it for homework, meantime would everyone please work on their preferred garden patches? "This way, I'll show you the willows I grew. I kind of have a plan for how to use them. Only three beds outside the walls are marked out however. The rest we have to drill, and that needs to be with a lot of guards on the walls because if a group of infected evade our patrols we'll have a hoarde. Nine times out of ten its just a few specials that show up though. Nothing overwhelming."

"And the remaining ten percent?" Coach asked worriedly.

"Once or twice we'll get a big hoarde of commons come through." Lilly shivered. "We had to put the generators for our medical equipment underground." The willow trees were just sticks, two foot long twigs, set in buckets with fish tank water filters running through them. Lilly plucked up one of the yellow colored sticks and Coach could see roots growing out of it, a long healthy looking tangle. "all of our heavy equipment is going to be moved down there eventually and only brought out for specific tasks."

"How'd you get that to work?" Coach eyed the branch curiously. "They look aweful small for something to break up spitter fire."

"just stick them in water and they grow. They grow very fast, two or three years and they'll be as big as you are. If the infection drags on long enough, they'll provide plenty of cover and they're easy to prune so we can make them the height and shape we want. The branches can be made into baskets or medicine or screens to further assist in breaking up infected line of sight." Lilly smiled. "I love willows." Her manner was so serene, so stately. Coach was entranced. "When i was a child we had a house with a stream in back and a great big willow tree. I used to use the branches and string to make doll houses. And my mother... she made a bench, a living bench, weaving the branches. On a starry night we'd sit out there, me and mom and dad and they'd take turns telling me stories."

"Sounds idyllic." Coach realized how closely they were standing together. Lilly was so beautiful, even though her hair was graying and her eyes had stress lines around them. The world seemed still around them, and just when they'd leaned close enough Coach was sure he'd get a kiss...

... "NURSE LILLYYYYYYY COOOAAAAACH! MAKE TONY GO TO THE INFIRMARY!" The girl in the volunteer shirt ran in, her slightly scruffy black ponytail streaming behind her. "HE GOT HOT PEPPER JUICE IN HIS EYES FARTING AROUND AGAIN!"

"YOU AREN'T MY MINDER TINA!" A black haired boy with similar appearance to the girl yelled. His right eye was swelling and fallen shut with tears spilling out of the corner.

"YOU'RE A JERK! JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE FOUR MINUTES OLDER THAN ME YOU THINK YOU CAN BOSS ME AROUND!" The girl yelled.

"AM NOT!" "AM TOO!" "AM NOT!" "AM TOO!"

Lilly let out an exasperated noise. "WHAT have I told you about taking care of yourself?" She dragged Tony off. "Coach my lesson plan is on the bullitain board in the work area. I'm going to get this one a milk compress and a chill pill."

"Milk?" Coach questioned as Lilly dragged the teenager away.

"First aid for hot pepper burn, drink milk if you've eaten it or make a cold compress using it if its gotten on you." The girl explained as Coach went over to grab the lesson plan. "Then put it on the burning area. Its why you serve cheese and spicy food together." The girl smirked, proud of herself.

A yell went up from the wall. "SPITTER HIT THE DIRT!" Coach dropped his lesson plan, catching sight of the goopy missile headed for one of the garden beds.

"I got it i got it i got it!" he heard Nick yelling somewhere behind him as Coach ran towards that bed, hauling the student working on that garden bed away. The students gathered around the damaged plants and fizzling goo with disappointment on their faces. "Great... you can have that one." Tina grumbled to Coach. "There's some salad mix in there, for growing stir fry greens. Its the ammo can marked 'blends.'"

"eeeewwwwww..." One of the kids used a stick to pick up a pepper from the ruined raised bed that was blackened and melted to what looked like paper and goop.

"Keep it away from me!" One of the younger boys looked slightly green. "I'm gonna lose my lunch!" The group of kids were disheartened at the sight.

"Alright now, settle down we're ok. What are the odds another one's gonna come?" Coach cupped his hands to his mouth. "Hey nick did you get her? We got some kids here who are real annoyed at that spitter!"

"Yeah, we're catching specimens for Woad don't mind us! If they want to get a look at the monster later they'll get their chance."

"Sweet! Thanks Nick!" Coach turned to the students. "you hear that? your hard work is avenged." He walked over to the tools and ammo cans full of seed packets and started leafing through them.

When Lilly came back half an hour later, aggravated from teenage boy daredevil antics, she found Coach hard at work to replant the damaged seed bed, piling the dead pepper plants up, goo now inert from reacting with the plants. "The soil looks fluffy after the spitter hit it... how could that be? I'd have thought it would be goopy."

"reacts with the silica part of the soil." Lilly chuckled. "Eventually there's no more protons to donate no more covalent bonds to bind electrons together and the acid dissapates, leaving soft friable soil with easily accessible organic matter for insects. They swarm in over a few days to the spitter damaged soil, turning it into insect frass, insect manure really, and the soil turns black and fluffy and great for gardening, what did you pick to plant?"

"Stupid spitters, this is the third one in a month!" Every so often Tina was grumbling in irritation and taking it out on the weeds in the garden beds.

"Sassy salad mix." Coach chuckled. "Sounded sexy." They were close again, and he blushed like a schoolgirl.

The two looked into each other's eyes... and they were about to kiss again when the littlest of the class started making ooooooh noises and chanting. "Coach and teacher sittin in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G."

Coach stood, suddenly realizing his bum knee had gotten stiff. "Don't you sass your elders young man. Someday you'll be kissing a girl and have some bratty teenager do that to you, and how would you like it?"

"Here..." Lilly handed Coach a knee pad. "Remember to use one of these next time."

"Thanks... old football injury."

"Never understood the sport. Medically its barbaric. We expect way too much from our young men, and they pay for it with brain injuries and joint pain for the rest of their lives." Lilly looked about to fuss, a posessive smile on her face.

"So um... the kid?" Coach asked hopefully.

"Oh Tony is laying down in the infirmary, sound asleep with a compress on his eye. I caught him with an empty benedryl pill packet. One of those push paper things. He must have taken the last one so he'd sleep it off."

Out of the corner of his eye Coach could see the spitter that wrecked the garden bed carried unconscious to doctor Woad's office. He could see the red feathered syringe sticking out of the base of her neck.

"Come on, some of the traders have been asking for hot peppers and one of them is due tomorrow. We should cover Tony's bed. It was going to be his trade."

As the afternoon wore on and Lilly periodically stopped the students work to show them different bugs or edible weeds that had cropped up in the garden beds. She had to refer to a clipboard for most of the edible wild plants, but knew enough of the good and bad ones to be able to teach the subject. Eventually crops gave way to visiting the fish pond. "Tilapia are related to what african fish kids?"

"Cichlids!"

"Thats right! They proliferate by the hundreds or even thousands per clutch of eggs and are adapted for tropical regions. They consume mosquitoes and algae so they're very useful for cleaning waterways and can be used to protect bodies of water from mosquito born diseases like malaria and west nile virus. With the infected posing a continuous danger its important to control other disease vectors because our colony is vulnerable to secondary infection."

"YEAH BABY THATS FIVE! HOW MANY YOU GOT RICKY?" Nick crowed. Throughout the lesson Coach noticed a steady stream of special and common infected with trank darts in their chests, necks and stomachs. A smoker, two hunters, a jockey with a plaid newsboy cap still pulled down over his head, a hunter with his hoodie sleeves and pants ripped off to about mid thigh, six commons, and a boomer with a mohawk of all hairstyles were the ones Coach had counted but the sounds of eager guards could be heard now and again implying that they were catching a lot more than he'd seen.

Lilly chuckled. "Woad probably had a contest for who could trank the most infected again."

"he do that before?" Coach looked over at her and Lilly handed him a basket of the tilapia the teenagers had netted.

"Yep, come on, these will give us fried fish or maybe even some chili for the kitchens. I know it was on the list for next week but we're running out of canned chicken and canned beef hash to make it with." Lilly sighed.

"Anything but lentils." Coach shook his head.

"Legumes are very reliable storage Coach." Lilly bumped him in a friendly way with her shoulder. "We just need things to balence them out thats all. Onions should be ready soon, but the collards we're only harvesting every other week. And spices well... the really strong hot peppers are Mari's domain. If you're feeling brave trade for some of those ghost chili crosses. Appearantly they're so strong they're used for elephant repellant in india. Or were, since the infection might have gotten them."

"World without elephants huh, kinda sad to me." Coach mused, shoulder bumping her back as they headed for the kitchens with their harvest.

* * *

By the time Ellis got done assessing the mass spectrometer the cages had begun to fill up with more infected. This time the Smoker was rushed away under heavy tranquilizers to the MRI. As the guards headed back out to the wall, Ellis noticed they were carrying extra boxes of explosive and incendiary ammo. "Expecting a hoarde doc?"

"They tick up when we turn on the generators attached to the MRI and Xray machines until about an hour after they're done running. The boxes I gave Nick and Ricky are for their personal stashes this is being issued in case of more specials."

Nick passed them, about kicking up his heals. "Gonna be a swingin party kiddo, too bad you're not invited." He stuck out his tongue at Ellis. "I got three more than Ricky but he's closing in fast."

"Are you sure its not Mari you're trying to impress rather than beatin Ricky?" Ellis asked with an annoyed expression on his face.

Nick swung a bit too close to H Doe's cage and the hunter snapped his teeth at Nick's flailing arm, snarling a warning to stay back.

"You and me both pardner." Ellis stopped to look down in the two cages. The witch had worn through two IV bags the previous night before Woad had finally authorized the serum. She was asleep on the cage mat. A new control group was being set up and another row of cages were being assembled.

"We're going to need to build a holding facility, these will fill up fairly quickly." Woad started checking the control cages one by one. Ellis picked up a crowbar and followed Woad, acting as a backup in case one tried to break free. "you probably won't need that." Woad told him. "I think our tank is about to bite it in a minute or two." The biggest of the cages was seperate and covered. "This was from the previous control group. But his blood pressure's been steadily rising over the past few days. His heart may be about to give out."

"Why?" Ellis blinked in surprise. "How long did he last? How long ago did you do the trial?"

"We had him a few days before the trial, about a week. His own body is burning him alive." Woad flipped up the cover.

The tank's legs had been bound with concrete, with a chain sticking out of it. He saw the two humans and roared angrily, struggling to get to his feet. The tank reached out to bang on the door only to stumble, as though he were faint. "Average body heat is a hundred and four for this guy. We implanted some instruments to monitor his vitals while he was knocked out before we put him in here and averaged out his resting body temperature, blood pressure and heart rate the entire time. We drew blood daily, had an intravenous port put into his shoulder. We tried for the veins in the neck but no dice, the point we'd have inserted it into is subsumed in muscle."

Ellis watched pityingly. Tanks, and killing or avoiding them, were literally matters of life and death. His squad could be slaughtered or almost so in a couple of minutes if they weren't careful fighting one and he did not want to have to deal with one trying to get out of the cage. But as the tank struggled on the ground, breathing heavy, heartbeat getting faster and faster on the monitor, temperature rising, Ellis could only feel pity for the poor mutated beast that used to be a man. "you gone put him out of his misery?"

"Not without twenty heavily armed guards backing me up. As it was I had to trank him about half the time I took blood."

The tank was struggling on the ground, panting feverishly. Then all of a sudden he jerked, and the monitor flatlined. "Severe adrenal stress, leading to heart failure. The last two we captured met the same fate. Testosterone levels are terrifyingly high, their blood plasma is flooded with damaged cells and mitochondria that were left behind when his cells started to break. Its as if the heat, the virus, the hormone flood, all conspired to make this thing its own funeral pyre. He lies dormant in there, not sleeping or hibernating just... there... until we open the curtain. We kept it there for his own safety. In the past our trucks have outrun tanks only for the lumbering brutes to collapse from exhaustion and these too died of heart failure. Their hearts just burst." Woad crossed himself and began to open the cage. "Get me a gurney Mister Ellis... we'll get him to autopsy while he's still warm. I'd like you to study the manuals Dani left behind. She wrote on them, leaving instructions on how to operate the mass spectrometer."

* * *

Deep below the compound, Rochelle followed Lovelace and a trio of technicians with a gas can and a headlamp. "how far down are we?" She asked worriedly.

"About 50 feet. We've got catecombs, where we bury the colony's dead down the tunnel on the right, and our generators are sunk into the soil closer to us than that on the right, to reduce the noise they make. It seems to work. To the left we have the new research facility. We dug it specifically for overflow in the event that Doc Mercer's research into the infected bears fruit. But its just an empty earthen room for now." Lovelace set down his old fashioned railroad lantern. "This is it. Look down." Rochelle could see the top of a generator sticking out of the soil. "We need this for the kid too. Docs want to xray him and/or MRI him. The Smoker and spitter specimens will get checked over afterwards, restrained and tranquilized with blindfolds on of course."

Another technician spoke up. "This is also the only place where we can really use heavy machinery without the infected catching on too badly. The soil dissapates the soundwaves. Our northern outpost is built on limestone caverns for this reason. We used scrap metal from damaged buildings and pieces of damaged cars to help shore up the cieling of it otherwise it could turn into a sinkhole, which we don't want because the infected will stream in, fall to their deaths and then we'll have corpses to clean."

One by one they emptied their gascans into the generator. "This should provide electricity to the medical machinery until around midnight. More than long enough to screen every infected in our custody with the MRI and Xray imagers. We could even opt to end our work night earlier by flipping a switch and enabling a battery to soak up the remaining electricity and feed it back out in the morning when we're ready to use it." Lovelace pulled the switch and radioed into his walkie talkie. "This is Lovelace, we've started the generator."

* * *

Above in the labs, H Doe started growling. The sleeping witch in the cell next to him jumped, creeling slightly in confusion and wobbling back and forth. She made a noise, like she was trying to keen a couple of notes, only for them to rasp in her throat, then began glowering out from the confines of her cage. Every time Ellis looked at her she tried to rip through the glass and when he wasn't looking directly at her the witch would keep her head low to the ground. H Doe was on alert too, but not angry or trying to attack, more like curious. "Graaaaaow?" He started pacing in confusion.

"Ellis close the curtains covering the cages." Woad urged him. "The vibrations underground are confusing our guests. And get H Doe some bone broth, its a bit early but we need to try and desensitize him. I've got to figure out how to keep this tank on ice. There's an empty walk in cooler I think..." One of the nurses, come to check on the activity and lend a hand, got flagged down and sent to go looking instead of Woad.

"rerrreooooorar" H Doe started to growl and grumble, looking down at his feet and stamping his hands and feet on the ground as though he were trying to target something under his feet. The commons weren't much better, sliding their feet across the ground. Ellis moved down the row, pulling curtains over the cages.

Ellis covered the witch up, just as she tried to get him through the glass and slammed her face on it. "Looks painful. But wait till you've had that serum in you a couple hours maybe then you'll brighten up. Who knows, maybe you'll even stop cryin."

"sleep is honestly the first thing they seem to do." Woad sighed. "When we gave them the serum, the commons all woke up for an hour or two, and then crashed on the mats we gave them. We've got a busy night my boy. I need a set of strong arms and a much stronger back."

Woad flicked the curtains down one by one. It was a bad time for their tank to bite it, right when they were busy like this. If he could slow decomposition until the following day he'd be golden. H Doe lifted his nose a couple minutes later, just before Ellis came in with hot bone broth. "A shame this stuff is so hard to get now. Mosta the critters we'd have used are gone."

"A gator or two, actually. They come up from the swamps because of the smell of corpses. Our folks at the harbor catch them. There was that longhorn a trader found with his leg cracked. But he was a steer, nothing to do but eat him."

"I thought those were in texas?"

"They are..." H Doe hesitated to drink his bone broth. "... the traders circle the carribean in two directions. One route heads for Florida, coming close to Havanna. Another goes along the coast towards Texas and south America. Virgil goes further, around the Florida panhandle and north to DC, then back again." When H Doe started to drink eagerly from the bowl and it slid he growled in frustration. It slid again, and a third time and then the hunter 'pinned' the bowl with his hands, letting out a smug "rarar."

"Well well..." chuckled Ellis. "learned to use your fingers huh? I don blame you, eatin with your fingers is fun!"

The witch started pawing at the glass, nails scribbling at it.

"she may smell the broth and want something of her own, or she may go to sleep. But I'd say thats a good sign. We'll keep her on IVs tonight." Woad smiled over at Ellis, "you did good. If you want a bit of privacy later tonight, Dani's cot isn't being taken."

"Maybe not tonight." Ellis said quietly, he looked down at H Doe. The hunter eyed him suspiciously, pulling the bowl back from the edge of the cage with his hands. "I don't want your broth, dinners gonna be soon."

* * *

Coach joined Rochelle and Lovelace at the back of the admin tower confrence room. "But they... ate?" A skeptical chinese voice asked on the video uplink. Coach counted five or six different monitors, including one that was labeled "Norad." All of the people on them wore military uniforms of some sort.

"Their bodies are so screwed up, we may only get a couple of them to survive. The common infected honestly have better chances of recovery. We're going to build a secondary room downstairs for recovery. But... they may not fully regain their humanity no matter what we do. Its up to the carriers I think. Put them in a heavily fortified self sustaining settlement and set them up for success, and I think they might surprise you." Mercer was saying confidently. "We can't mess this up, every dead human and every infected we can't save means humanity is that much closer to the brink."

"Beijing has already fallen. And the infected are beginning to crop up in our major cities." The man who said that had a monitor that read "Paris" at the bottom of it and a pronounced French accent. "Right now our city is being overrun, we can't even find out how they got in. We thought it hadn't subsumed the old soviet block yet."

"The metro probably."

"I'm not so sure." A brittish voice said quietly. "Except for the US and China, all of our countries have a transportation route in common..."

"Saudi Arabia." muttered Carter in frustration. "A ship ride away through the Suez canal and up the Mediterranean."

"I'm not surprised." A female german accent said irritably. "We all get shipments of cargo by plane and ship directly from the Saudis and we haven't heard from them in quite awhile. All it takes is one infected rat."

"Our government is still identifying people with the carrier gene. We've got about a hundred so far and some sheep and rabbits that had it as well. We're sending them to the north sea on an old oil rig with a seed bank and three years of supplies. Once we get another twenty we'll start populating another oil rig. They're all fairly close together so they have the advantage of trade and mutual defense."

"We've got 50 split up over three submarines." The chinese military representative said quietly. "They know that our country's entire heritage rests with them."

"Its too late for an organized defense gentlemen. Berlin dropped yesterday. I'm locked underground for the duration." The female german voice said primly. "God be with you. We've set up depots and our people are evacuating northeast."

"Ambassador." The brittish accent said quietly. "Send any refugees you evacuate to the oil rigs we're setting up on. The both of you."

"Are you sure admiral?" The german accent asked in surprise.

"yes. We're the great european powers, we grew, allied, fought and reallied again as nations with each other. Its time to fall together."

"You heard the man, get on the radio start directing evacuees towards the ocean." And then. "If you're right Doctor Mercer, the carriers should survive while the others turn one by one?"

"Not always, you need those tests. And they should only let people on with the immunity or carrier gene. Immunity is much rarer but it does exist. We have maybe four people that are completely immune to the green flu out of 400 but the United states has a very varied genome."

"We'll have to do without, but I'm sure my colleagues will be able to be more thorough." The german accent replied.

Coach slipped forwards to see the two who hadn't spoken. Based on history he had a hunch, and it proved correct. Spain and Italy, is what the other two monitors were labeled.

"Do you really think the recovered count is going to be so small Doctor?" The Chinese representative asked quietly.

"I do unfortunately. The green flu is part rabies, nobody survives regular rabies once symptoms appear. The green flu wrecks both the brain and the endocrine system."

"The rabies case in Milwakee?"

"A teenage fluke, and she was brain damaged in the extreme, an infant in a teenager's body. Multiple other doctors tried, their patients were all older and all died. The longer the infected go without getting that serum into them, the greater the odds we aren't getting them back."

"Then we had best get to work." The brittish representative replied. "Godspeed, all of you." And he signed off. One by one the other representatives, except for Norad signed off.

"do you really think its that bleak?" The general on the monitor marked Norad asked.

"Yes sir. The fate of humanity rests in protecting the carriers and restoring as much functionality to the infected as possible so they have a chance of developing antibodies. The process of doing the latter may be painfully slow. And we may not be able to accomodate very many, but we have to try."

"Angel Island on the west coast is setting itself up to try and do the same thing you are." The general said quietly. "Anything else you need?"

"I... I need something... sir..." Rochelle spoke up quietly.

Mercer and Carter moved their chairs out of the way so Rochelle could walk between them. "And you are..."

"My name's Rochelle sir, I am... was... a reporter from Ohio. My parents... they're probably immune. Lovelace and I tried earlier to get a message out to Cleveland but the ozark mountain range is cutting off the signal. Your crew headed there... can you try to radio them... see if they can put up a recruitment beacon?"

"Their next check in is bright and early tomorrow, 0600 mountain. We should have an answer for you by 0900 your time."

"Thank you sir... I know they're probably dead but..."

"Serve and protect Rochelle. Serve and protect." The General responded with a polite nod. "My condolences if they didn't make it."

"General, we should try to extend the invitation as far north and south as possible. Surely national boarders don't count now." Carter said quietly.

"They do and don't... anybody from canada or mexico wants to join us I don't see the problem or the point of throwing them back out there. Maybe someday but not now. I'll relay it north, I think there are a couple of mounties still surviving in the forests. good night..." With that, Norad signed off.

"So we may lose most of Berlin... and all of Beijing... and their bunkers may well have been contaminated." Carter sighed. "Should have had Nick come and start watching the german's face. I think its already in her bunker and she's expecting it to fail soon."

"Do you really think it came to Europe on a ship?" Coach asked worriedly.

"All it takes is one infected rat and a large enough population of them to keep the infection hot for the journey." Mercer shuddered. "Our world stops without oil and coal flowing through it to specific strategic points. The disease getting into one of those... eyeballing the problem without the SIR equation it looks right."

"SIR equation?" Rochelle tilted her head curiously. She caught onto things fairly quickly as a reporter. "I agree with Carter's assessment though, the german representative was way too tense even under the circumstances, and when the UK representative offered to take german carrier refugees into their project the look of relief on her face was way too strong. I think she knows she's on borrowed time and needed something to hope for."

Mercer sighed. "So do I Rochelle, we all need hope. The SIR equation is used to determine the spread and infection rate of a disease. All I get is bad news most days. I get dispatches day after day, usually by old AM radio, about places that are falling and fighting the disease. We're just lucky the government managed to shutter the nuclear plants without them melting down. And then there's the genetic diversity needed... you yank every mammal out of the ecosystem you're going to get some crazy results. And the loss to the livestock that helped to sustain us and strengthen our immune systems as a species... future generations will be much more vulnerable to disease, their immune systems respond more slowly."

"Wait that last bit makes no sense." Coach shook his head. "How could farm animals make our immune systems stronger?"

"Because disease goes back and forth from humans to animals and each time both humans and animals learn what that disease organism looks like and are able to pass that information on to the next generation. Because of modern healthcare, those of us in the developed world actually started to see our immune systems weaken somewhat because of the extreme cleanliness of our society and the lack of animal to human transmissions. For example, we have some of the highest rates of allergies compared to developing countries. asthma, auto immune disorders, even cancers, they all stem from the immune system not being able to identify what's harmful and what's not properly. That lack is what doomed the native americans, a scenario I'm desperate to prevent in our colony's future generations, they started with less than a hundred people who crossed the Bering strait, and as a result when smallpox came, 90% of them died. We need that diversity and that experience to survive."

Lovelace's relief came running in. "Doc, Adam one of our traders just radio'd this report in. Houston is burning and Galveston is swarmed with commons. Three vessels ETA one week, each of them with at least one refugee. Some of the ones they took on board are turning."

"Right, have blood serum ready to ship. We might be able to nip the infection in the bud when it sets in, before the damage gets too bad. Have them turn on their GPS markers and send a rescue vessel out to meet them. We have one equipped with refrigeration lets use it to shorten the time they're infected and see what happens. Are they equipped to confine infected?"

"Commons yes, anything larger than a hunter forget it."

"Bring sedatives, and make sure you have something to send them food wise for their trouble."

"yes ma'am." Lovelace hurried into the radio room, Rochelle after him in time to hear. "Colony this is the One 4 All do you copy? over." It sounded like Louis! The radioman nudged Rochelle with her elbow to encourage her to pick up.

"This is Colony we copy. What's your status One 4 All?" Rochelle's hands shook in excitement.

"Hey is that Rochelle? Hi Rochelle!" She could hear a scuffle for the reciever as Francis grabbed it. "Hey you should see what's cooking down in Havana. We thought we'd get some of that famous cuban spice but the place is swarming with infected. I counted a tank, two witches, and a dozen other specials on shore in the space of an hour. There is no freakin place for us to pull in Ro! The tank shoved a bunch of commons off the shore trying to get us! He even threw one at us! Can't reach of course..."

"Good to hear your voice Francis, sure sounds like a party." Rochelle chuckled. "I'll make a note in the logs."

"I'm just glad you made it to Colony. Not my cup of tea, too many soldiers, I hate the army! But the people there aren't bad... I just hate the army. Its safe though, and they really seem serious about trying to build a town there!"

Rochelle took her finger off the button long enough to giggle. "I'm training under the radio operator there, Lovelace."

"Oh yeah the weedy guy with the epic Batman collection! He had some good stuff! Listen, the wind's picking up Ro we gotta hustle! I'll keep my ears open for that lovely voice of yours."

Rochelle turned pink around the ears. "Godspeed Francis."

"God got nothin to do with it, take care!" That last bit was gruff, like Francis didn't want his survival to be a matter of luck. But then again, when you thought about it in the context of the pandemic the thought of divine intervention or retribution was actually pretty terrifying.

Coach touseled Rochelle's hair. "Hey, you got to see that bikerman again. Good for you."

"Yeah... I'm satisfied Coach. And Francis sounds like he's getting along alright."

"Good things are worth waiting for girl." Coach put an arm around Rochelle's shoulders and when they passed Lilly he put the other arm around the Nurse's waist. "And speaking of good things... do I smell fresh bread?"

"better... fish burgers." Lilly beamed. "I know the smell of the oil anywhere."

It wasn't fish burgers. It was hushpuppies and coleslaw made from collard greens. "ho baby." Coach grinned from ear to ear.

"Well they changed it up. This is a nice surprise." Lilly beamed. "Coach I have to have a word with some of the foster parents taking care of my students. You're gonna have to eat alone tonight."

"Alright, have a good night Lilly."

Rochelle watched him sigh fondly as Lilly walked away. "Hey... you gonna make your move?"

"I'm just enjoying myself..." Coach chuckled. "Ro I left family, colleagues and students behind... I don't have to hurry and I don't want to." He ruffled her hair paternally. "Hey, looks like Nick and Lovelace found a spot, but i don't see Mari or Ellis any..."

Ellis ran in then with Mason riding on his back horsey style. "Yaaaay! Elli Elli giddyap giddyap!" Ellis laughed and neighed, even making clopping noises with his tongue and cheek.

Rochelle laughed, grabbing her tray and falling into the food line. Mason slid off of Ellis' back and ran into the kitchen, then back out again with a little container of hush puppies and a container of coleslaw. Rochelle could see a pair of arms of one of the kitchen staff gently pushing him out. Mason ran over to the table where the leaders sat, and Mercer, grinning tenderly, pulled out a chair to make room for him as he clung to her side.

Ellis slipped into line behind Rochelle, chuckling. "See? He's not creepy, just needs a little love thats all."

"How are things down in the lab?"

"Woad dubbed the new witch in the serum group 'Morgain.' He gave her warm milk with a little ginger and a spoonfull of sugar but she wouldn't drink it just yet. H. Doe is paying way more attention to us than I like but I can't tell if that means he's changin in his head or what." Ellis shook his head. "And that Mass spectrometer of Woad's is just plain wrecked. Somethin chewed the wires up, a couple of the circuit boards shattered. It needs parts from another one."

"The generators didn't set off the infected did they?"

"kinda... but not severely... they didn't start throwing themselves at the glass if thats what you mean." Ellis shrugged. "They just got restless. We had to cover the witch's cage. And the tank... the one they had in the control group before the one we saw them catch, died. Woad had him moved to a spare walk in freezer so he can focus. But with all the nurses down there going every which way..." They took a seat with Nick, and Coach joined them a moment later.

Lovelace was shaking his head at Nick. "No no, it appeared at around the same time in different cities all over Europe. But Rochelle was pretty sure listening to the german representative... we won't be hearing from them for much longer."

"Her face was a mile long Nick." Rochelle piped up.

"If you have a video log I can go over it with you Lovelace, coach you on reading their body language."

"Could you?"

"yeah but not tonight, i have to have my head shrunk by the town witchdoctor." Nick grumbled. "I hate people poking around in my head. If telepathy were real, I'd have to shoot anybody that had it, because I HATE people poking around in my business. They always put it back on mommy and daddy. How many folks have broken homes that grow up to be fucking normal?"

"Thats a new one..." A voice behind him chuckled. "Witch doctor? By the way Nick your suit's slated to be cleaned tomorrow. I still think bluejeans and a button down would be better for day wear, that poor thing has been through enough. Coach I can clean your jersey too while I'm getting Nick's done." Nick jumped a mile when he realized Mari had crept up behind him.

Nick's mouth opened and shut and opened again, his cheeks red with embarassment that Mari had heard him.

"What about my bullshifter's shirt? its my favorite." Ellis asked plaintively. "I really wanna wear it if there's a big raid gonna go down. I'm totally going. I have to make sure Woad gets his parts for his lab stuff."

"You're gonna have to talk to Tommy then over at the admin table." Mari pointed him out. "But there's usually a sign up sheet out the morning after its decided. And I can clean your hat as well as your shirt." Mari promised. "The laundry is kind of a girls club kinda thing, even the female scientists drop in now and again. If its not the wash boards and hand cranks its keeping the water kettle full so we have hot water to sterilize the clothes with. But we have to meet tonight... we girls... to plan out what we're gonna do, so I'll see you later... handsome."

"Wow..." Nick's eyes sparkled for a moment. "What a woman..." He ahermed self consciously, realizing he was acting like a smitten teenager.

Coach chuckled. "Its alright Nick..."

The meal was nearing its end, plates of snicker doodles were being passed around, and Carter stood up to address the colony. "Sign up sheets for a raid on Saint James Cancer Hospital will be placed out at 0600 tomorrow morning here in the mess. Against my better judgement, Woad and Mercer have convinced me to lead the mission. Com and mechanic office representatives are required, and every team must have a heavy gunner. Apprentices under the age of 18 are not allowed on this mission. No exceptions." A loud groan of frustration came from the teenage table. "The reason why we've decided to go ahead despite the danger is because an injured carrier surfaced and turned out to have a rare transmittable tumor from a smoker. The case was bad enough that his leg had to be amputated to keep the tumor from spreading. This is not normal in so far as we know, but people on watch are to keep their distance from smokers as best they can and monitor their health. We need to retrieve cancer drugs from the pharmacy there just in case the tumor transmitted further. Now I believe Doctor Woad has an update on his research?" Randy sat down, tilting his head at the coroner.

"Right then..." Woad stood up. "Thank you town watch for collecting specimens for me this afternoon. I'm quite happy with the amount that were gotten. The behavior of subject labeled H Doe continues to display a shift in behavior towards being calmer and more cautious. He's begun mimicking human behavior and most importantly he and all the infected in the first serum group started drinking fluids and eating soft food. With this shift, I feel its safe for production of a secondary holding facility in one of the hollowed out rooms under the complex. This will house infected being treated with Mercer's blood serum. The work will be paid for in the usual supply chits and cash." Nick preened a little at Woad's thank you. Coach elbowed him gently to remind him not to be so full of himself. "Now Nora my dear, I believe you have a final update for us." Woad sat down and Mercer rose to speak.

"I'm proud to announce that two new carrier colonies are being established. One on an oil rig off the shores of the UK in the North Sea, one on Angel Island off the coast of San Francisco. This is following confirmed reports of special infected in the sierra nevada range. Norad has found a full team of carriers among their number and will be gathering data on the damage on a path from them to us and feeding that data in both directions, north to Cheyenne Mountain, south to us. We have confirmation of the loss of the cities of Galveston, Houston, Texas City, Moore, Kansas City, Chicago, and Las Vegas in the United States, Havanna in Cuba, San Juan in Puerto Rico and Toronto and Montreal in Canada. Combat in the cities of Shanghai, Berlin, Madrid and Paris are ongoing, Rome is having sporadic cases of the Green Flu crop up, and the infection is expected to worsen. We've confirmed the death of the German chancelor and the Brittish and French Prime Ministers. The Pope in Vatican City is presumed to be in hiding and noone has yet been able to confirm his status. Status is also unknown of the Saudi royal family, but Ras Tenura oil terminal is overrun with the infected."

"Oh boy..." Rochelle groaned. Many people were bowing their heads sadly at the loss of some of the great cultural centers or loved ones or favorite vacation spots in the caribean.

"Ras Tenura's a bad one. I wouldn't fight there if you paid me in solid gold." Nick shook his head. "Texas city's another bad one, and the oil terminal in Houston. It was bad before but..."

"I'm assuming that means no more gas out west?" Ellis asked worriedly.

"Oh its worse. Texas City was the most prepared city in america for a reason. Oil refineries, chemical plants, hell, back in the 40s the place was almost wiped out by a fertilizer fire." Rochelle shook her head. "And Ras Tenura... I know a guy who did a story there. All the oil saudi arabia produces goes through Ras tenura. They have miles of giant tanks of oil the size of like... ten houses."

"One misplaced shot, one dodged spitter loogie, one wrong move with a molotov or explosive or fire rounds, the place could go up like a monster sized bomb." Nick shivered in fear. "Never, not going there ever."

"Please everyone, listen to me, I won't keep you much longer because of the nature of this announcement." Doctor Mercer raised her voice a bit. It took a few minutes, but eventually the crowd settled. "Because of this, our work is more important than ever. This is not the time to let our guards down even though we're soon to not be alone. We are the example and we must continue to be. Old hostilities and social classes will only tear us apart. Fear will tear us apart. We are strong when we stand together and stand up to the infected. If we continue to be so, and set the example, the other colonies will follow us. If anything, we have an even broader united front to present to the infection. This virus is not going to end us. We will survive. Whatever it takes."

"And what it takes is starting over. Already, its been proven, letting go of our past social divisions, our expectations for the future pre infection, allows us to prosper. Using our higher wisdom, you know, that grey stuff between our ears." That got a nervous chuckle from the gathered survivors. "Is the way forward, observe, evaluate, and create for yours and our survival. It may not be the future we invisioned for ourselves when we were young, but we DO have a future!"

"Here here!" One of the guards cheered, pounding the table eagerly for emphasis. Others took up the cheer or raised cups and mugs and cans of soda or beer.

"Now to recap the raid details before I let you all go for the evening. The sign up sheets for the hospital run will be up tomorrow morning after breakfast. We're barring that mission to those apprentices under the age of 18. Its dangerous, we don't want to risk our younger members if we don't have to. We have slots for certain specific skills or fighting styles open. The public briefing will be tomorrow morning after breakfast right here. Now... I bid you all goodnight." Mercer sat down at her position at the admin table, sipping a cup of tea quietly.

Nick peered at the clock above the admin table, trying to see the time. "Crap its almost 7."

"Have fuuuuuun." Rochelle teased.

"Shut up." Nick snapped. "Fuck and with Ras Tenura overrun... I mean Havana's a bad enough loss. All that lovely food and cigars to go with the night life." He strode away, grumbling.

"Shame about Havanna Cuban food's always fulla life." Coach sighed wistfully. "There's some history there you know. When the soviet union fell they stopped exporting oil to Cuba. Castro could have done a lot of things, but what he did was let small scale agriculture go wild. Decades later, Cuba's got beautiful colorful markets and flavorful spices to show for it all."

"Ashes to ashes I suppose. Sorry Coach." Ellis said consolingly.

"Hey Ellis!" Martin bounded over eagerly with four plates of cookies. "I wanted to talk to you in the library today."

"Oh yeah sorry I found the name of someone I know on the sign out list. I got real excited." Ellis chuckled. "She's pretty and one helluva shot. Badass attitude too! Not everyone's willing to mouth off to Nick."

"Really? Thats cool but um... I kinda need your help with something."

"Okay shoot."

"I'm trying to get the admin to approve this experiment but since I'm an apprentice I have to try harder to get noticed. I don't have college you see, I'm only 17." Martin explained. "I have to come up with some sort of arguement as to why I should be allowed. Really Mercer's serum and agriculture related things typically get priority over microbes that don't have anything to do with the green flu."

"I see... so whatddyou need?"

"Help finding some major scientific figure from days of yor, hopefully one that studied microbes, that did something stupidly dangerous to prove their theories were right, something no scientist today would do because of ethical reasons. I have to prove that you don't have to be perfect personality and education wise to do science stuff as long as you know the scientific method."

"So who did you look at so far?" Rochelle asked curiously as Coach muttered a thanks for the sweet and headed off after Lilly.

"Well... I looked into the guys that proved yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes. I also looked into Tuberculin, but neither was really what I was looking for. The guy that actually took the risk with yellow fever died proving it. And Koch was um... kinda foolish with his handling of tuberculin but not in the way that I think would make an impression. I need someone relevant to studying the green flu."

"What are you hoping to test with this?" Rochelle asked. Ellis leaned in a bit closer as Martin pulled out a notebook.

"You're... you might laugh. Ellis is cheery and kinda... no offense, ignorant, so I figured he wouldn't judge." Martin hesitated a little, looking over at Ellis for reassurance. Ellis nodded encouragement.

"I won't, plus as a reporter I hear things. I'm a real good listener." Rochelle offered with a warm smile.

Martin took a deep breath, opened his notebook, and blurted out. "I want to test the effects of probiotics on the infected."

The two of them looked at each other. Rochelle got a crafty smile on her face. "I think I know just the historical figure for you to dredge up dirt on. Louis Pasteur."

"Wait why him?"

"I'm not spoiling it. Lets just say that he took risks developing a certain vaccine that would make Ellis' jaw hit the floor."

"Seriously?" Ellis arched an eyebrow. "All the shit Keith pulled on a regular basis, I highly doubt that."

"Trust me... this was stupid." Rochelle smirked. "But I'm not gonna spoil it. Just dig through Pasteur's biography. Martin I want you to actually do the reading and research."

The boy nodded. "Thank you Rochelle." He grinned. "Ellis lets meet tomorrow okay?" He grabbed his notebook and ran off, presumably for the library.

"Sure thing!" Ellis called after him. "I'm 'cheery and too ignorant to judge' huh?" He asked in a lower voice.

Rochelle laughed. "I'm sure he was trying to put it nicely. But its more whats in your heart thats your strength rather than what's between the ears yes." She smiled up at him. "But you're like the little brother I never had and I wouldn't trade you for all the gold in the world." She gave him a friendly nudge with her shoulder. "Just rely on me and Nick to be the brains and you be our heart and I think as a group no matter what we'll be fine. Okay?"

"sure Rochelle, but you... don't hold it against me if I spend a lot of time in the library or listening to Doc Woad. I don't like being 'too ignorant to judge.'" Ellis sounded disappointed.

"not at all..." Rochelle sighed as she walked away. "I have 'homework' to do." She added with a laugh. "Got to review all the ham radio lingo."

Ellis decided he was going to check on the infected in the serum trial and maybe see if Woad needed anything that night. After all he had to get all the infected mri'd while they had the machine didn't he?

Sure enough, the Doctor handed Ellis an M16 on the way to the lab. "I need a hand my boy, but if you last the whole night, I've got a chit in it for you."

"Sure thing doc. Always something interesting at your place." Ellis slung the rifle by the strap over his shoulder and shuffled off down the hall after the elderly Coroner.


End file.
